Siemens is claiming that it has set a new world speed record for wireless transmission, 1 Gbps in real time. The test transmission uses a 100 MHz wide band in the 5 GHz range, an unlicensed band also used by the 802.11a variant of Wi-Fi. Siemens used what it dubbed an "intelligent antenna system", consisting of three send and four receive antennas. The transmission was encoded using a new Siemens-developed signal processing technique and transmitted using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), an increasingly popular system for high-bandwidth wireless transmissions.
Although impressive, Seimens' demonstration is for now just a demonstration. The 5 GHz band is a low-power, unregulated band not especially useful for wide-area broadcasts, and a seven antenna setup draws considerably more power than conventional mobile phone radios. Nonetheless, it shows promise for future wireless broadband options.
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