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Download Speeds Of 300 Mbps Wirelessly? That's What NTT DoCoMo Is Up To

Verizon Wireless' and Sprint's high-speed EV-DO Revision A networks pale in comparison to what NTT DoCoMo is attempting to cook up in its labs. It has begun testing "Super 3G" and hopes to blast bits of data through the air at 300 Mbps. Will we ever see speeds like that in the United States?

DoCoMo plans to use this enhanced 3.9G technology as a stepping stone to Long Term Evolution (LTE), which is the distant future of wireless data.

According to NTT DoCoMo, Super 3G features low-latency data transmission and improved spectrum efficiency. It is a highly advanced version of High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA), which have been evolved from W-CDMA packet transmission technologies.

Here is how it is going to work:

DoCoMo will begin with an indoor experiment to test transmission speed using one transmitting and one receiving antenna. The company will then expand the experiment to examine downlink transmission by employing up to four Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antennas for both the base station (transmission side) and mobile station (receiving side); the goal is to achieve a downlink transmission speed of 300 Megabits per second. MIMO is an antenna technology for wireless communications in which different data streams are spatially multiplexed using multiple antennas for both transmission and reception on the same frequency. Also to be examined is the "handover function" — switching of the connection between two base stations.

Since The 3GPP is still working to define exactly what LTE will encompass, it is not clear what role this Super 3G technology will play. On top of that, the speeds DoCoMo is aiming for surpass those of the LTE mandate, which is targeting 100 Mbps on the downlink.

DoCoMo doesn't think it will have its Super 3G systems ready to go until 2009. That means it will be two years or more before the Japanese have a chance to experience these speeds via their mobile phones or wireless laptop cards. It will assuredly be much longer before U.S. wireless subscribers see such speeds.

Until then, we'll have to make do with EV-DO Rev. A (maybe Rev. B?), WiMax, and HSPA.

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