120 Mbps Speeds Achieved in LTE Field Testing

Fujitsu and NTT DoCoMo have recently announced that they managed to conduct successful LTE trials and achieve transmission speeds of around 120Mbps. The two companies also stated that the field testing for Long-term Evolution (LTE) was conducted using 4x4 MIMO.

The testing site for the LTE technology was the Special Ubiquitous Zone, in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo in Hokkaido, a region that was designated back in 2008 a wireless communications testing area by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The companies used 10 MHz bandwidth for their testing while managing to achieve the impressive speeds of 120Mbps.

The LTE transmissions were conducted in Sapporo's urban environment, according to the two companies, which announced that the 120 Mbps speeds on the 10 MHz bandwidth were obtained over a measured course. At the same time, they also stated that a 240 Mbps throughput could be achieved on a 20 MHz maximum bandwidth allowed by LTE.

Fujitsu, Fujitsu Laboratories and NTT DoCoMo have been working together since 2006 for the development of LTE base stations. The forthcoming technology standard is expected to provide astonishing wireless performance, as faster and higher-capacity data communications, reduced lag for the connections, and a more efficient usage of the bandwidth.

The companies worked on the development of technologies using 4x4 MIMO, which is said to offer increased speeds and capacities for both transmitting base stations and receiving mobile stations. They also announced that a prototype three-sector LTE base station was successfully tested with “a transmission capacity of 300 Mbps per sector on the downlink (20 MHz band).“

The new transmission speeds the testing unveiled are about 35 times higher than those of 3.5G (7.2Mbps), and about 2.5 times higher than the speeds offered by the fixed optical fiber lines (100Mbps). Considering that such networks would be deployed for commercial availability, the performance increases over existing available networks would be more than impressive.