Siemens hits 1 gigabit per second in the lab with mobile technology: Siemens has developed technology that appears to incorporate MIMO (multiple antennas for transmitting and receiving) and OFDM (the encoding used in 802.11a and 802.11g) to create a 1 Gbps mobile wireless technology. In the lab, at least.
The press releases says: "By comparison: WLAN networks presently offer the fastest wireless links to mobile devices at speeds of around 50 MBit/s." But that's slightly specious. The Wi-Fi specs use about 20 MHz for a single channel to achieve symbol rates of over 100 Mbps. (A symbol rate is the raw bit flow, not the net data transferred.) Those rates are expected to increase to as much as 400 Mbps with the introduction in 2006 of 802.11n.
Now Siemens says they are using 100 MHz of 5 GHz spectrum. With today's technology, binding five channels together would get you a raw rate of 250 Mbps in compatible Wi-Fi modes and 500 Mbps in proprietary modes--and perhaps 2 Gbps in the future. And Proxim has long had 1 Gbps fixed wireless Ethernet bridges.
Their key breakthrough here is in building something that, in the lab, already shows the potential to fit into mobile devices and use relatively computational power to achieve the results necessary by relying on the MIMO approach to increase sensitivity and OFDM to deal with the real-world reflection of signals.
The company is looking for this to be exploited for cellular purposes, and it could be a giant threat to mobile WiMax unless mobile WiMax walks down a similar path. [link via MobileTracker]