Alca-Lu says new antenna technology boosts LTE, 3G data speeds

Alcatel-Lucent announced that its research arm, Bell Labs, has conducted live field tests of a new technology aimed at increasing the data transmission speeds of Long Term Evolution (LTE) and 3G networks.

Bell Labs, in conjunction with Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz Institut and antenna supplier Kathrein, said it tested a new technology called Coordinated Multipoint Transmission (CoMP), which is made possible by coordinating and combining signals from multiple antennas.

The live tests, conducted in the 2.6 GHz band, were conducted in a downtown area in Berlin as part of a joint research project sponsored by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) called Enablers for Ambient Services and Systems (EASY-C). Alcatel-Lucent said the CoMP technique helps improve bandwidth scalability by boosting transmission rates not only in the connection from the network to the user's mobile device (downlink), but from the mobile device to the network (uplink). The new technique is also designed to improve quality of service enabling high transmission rates on the uplink from the phone to the network, even at the edges of a cell where transmission quality is typically poor and difficult to maintain. The vendor data rates greater than 5Mbps were observed for the vast majority of locations during the test.

For more:
- see this Alcatel-Lucent release

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