Siemens claims gigabit wireless breakthrough
German company Siemens has shown what it claims to be the fastest-ever wireless network connection.
The demonstration at its Munich laboratories on Tuesday reached speeds of 1GB per second, 20 times faster than 802.11g, thanks to a combination of new OFDM techniques and multi-in, multi-out (MIMO) antenna technology.
The company had demonstrated the new modulation schemes without MIMO in September with speeds of up to 360MB per second. The demonstration system runs in the 5GHz band and uses a bandwidth of 100MHz, roughly three times the bandwidth of an 802.11g channel. This makes the Siemens system around seven times more efficient than the best of today's wireless networks.
"Future mobile communication systems will have to utilize the frequency band as efficiently as possible, with the lowest possible transmit power," Christoph Caselitz, president of the Mobile Networks Division at Siemens Communications, said in a prepared statement. "With our experimental system, we've been able to demonstrate how powerful intelligent antennas can be in combination with OFDM. In doing so, we've created a major module for future mobile communication systems."
