In a press release, Nokia-Siemens Networks has announced that they have successfully completed the first multi-user trial of an LTE network in an urban area.
The trial was conducted by placing a base station at the top of the Heinrich Hertz Institut building in the center of Berlin, Germany which is home to the Fraunhofer Institute of Telecommunications.
Test vehicles were outfitted with LTE terminals driving up to half a mile away from the base station location, sending and receiving data at a sustained data rate of 173 megabits per second, surpassing the data rates of 168 megabits achieved just one year prior in a stationary test.
The base station itself is built around a 2 by 2 antenna configuration supporting MIMO and transmitting at 2.6Ghz with 20Mhz of total bandwidth.
The base station will remain in its current installation throughout 2008 to further refine and conduct more real world testing of LTE based networks.
