LTE: Fujitsu achieves Downlink speed of 900 Mbps

DoCoMo and Fujitsu Laboratories have made progress in jointly developing prototype wireless base station equipment, and maximum downlink transmission speeds of approximately 900Mbps have now been achieved through the application of MIMO technology, a core technology for high-speed, high-volume wireless communications.

In November 2006 Fujitsu was selected by DoCoMo to develop and manufacture prototypes and commercial equipment for DoCoMo's "Super 3G" wireless base stations. Since then, DoCoMo and Fujitsu Laboratories have made good progress.

Since being selected to develop and manufacture DoCoMo's Super 3G wireless base station equipment, Fujitsu and Fujitsu Laboratories have worked with DoCoMo in developing the required technologies, and the companies have succeeded in developing a prototype wireless base station that achieves maximum downlink transmission speeds of approximately 900Mbps when using four antennas each (4x4 MIMO) for Super 3G base station transmission and mobile station reception as well as employing Fujitsu Laboratories' short-delay, high-speed error correction decoding technology.

Going forward, along with applying the results of development and evaluation work on MIMO and other Super 3G prototype technologies, Fujitsu will work to further refine the high-efficiency amplifiers and high-performance baseband processing technology it has developed for 3G wireless base station equipment in order to develop optimized commercial Super 3G wireless base station equipment that is compact, energy-efficient, economical, and highly scalable.

Fujitsu's prototype equipment will be exhibited at CEATEC Japan 2007 (2-6 Oct).

In other news, ABI Research has a new report that claims UMTS Long Term Evolution (LTE) will dominate the world’s mobile infrastructure markets after 2011. While LTE will encounter competition from other mobile broadband technologies, its supporters point to its flat architecture, low latency, and IP NGN (Next-Generation Network) capability to provide a range of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) services.

However LTE faces competition from other broadband wireless technologies and it will need to demonstrate clear technical and economic advantages to convince network operators. The mobile variant of WiMAX will start to appear in 2007 as the WiMAX Forum Certification program ramps up. The industry is also working on HSPA+, which could offer the same performance in a 5 MHz bandwidth. Without additional spectrum, operators could face a difficult choice.

300 Mbps with 'Super-FOMA'

NTT DoCoMo, Inc. announced that this month it began testing an experimental Super 3G system for mobile communications. With this experiment, DoCoMo will seek to achieve a downlink transmission rate of 300Mbps over a high-speed wireless network.

For people who are unaware, LTE is being branded as Super-3G as this term is more appealing as compared to LTE which would mean nothing to ordinary people.

DoCoMo will begin with an indoor experiment to test transmission speed using one transmitting and one receiving antenna. The company will then expand the experiment to examine downlink transmission by employing up to four Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antennas for both the base station (transmission side) and mobile station (receiving side); the goal is to achieve a downlink transmission speed of 300Mbps. MIMO is an antenna technology for wireless communications in which different data streams are spatially multiplexed using multiple antennas for both transmission and reception on the same frequency. Also to be examined is the "handover function" — switching of the connection between two base stations.

NTT DoCoMo's Super-3G timetable is available here

The reason i am calling this setup as Super-FOMA is because going back to when 3G was being introduced, DoCoMo wanted to be the first with 3G. As a result, they adopted a 3GPP Release version that wasnt stable and released it as FOMA. Now they are doing the same with LTE. LTE wont be stable in that timeframe so they might end up with Super-FOMA instead of Super-3G.

The company has also been aggressively pursuing 4G system development. In late December, the carrier came close to hitting a 5Gbit/sec. data transmission speed from an experimental 4G system to a receiver moving at 10 kilometers per hour.

Possibly it may be the first one with a 4G system and it might end up as Hyper-FOMA :)