Flarion Heats Up Data's Rate Race

By Joseph Palenchar On Feb 21 2005 - 8:00am

The data rate race is heating up.

Not one to be one-upped, Flarion has upgraded its Flash-OFDM wireless-data technology to accelerate peak downlink speeds to 15.9Mbps and average downlink speeds to 6Mbps. That's up from a previous peak 3.2Mbps downlink speed and an average 1Mbps downlink speed, all in fixed and portable applications and in moving vehicles at speeds up to 200 mph.

In comparison, peaks speeds of 14.4Mbps have been claimed for HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access), a technology that can be added to 3G W-CDMA networks.

The upgrade of Flarion's Flash-OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) is called Flash-OFDM Flexband and, like the original, is intended for licensed frequencies between 400MHz and 3.6GHz. In 1.25MHz channels, it delivers 5.3Mbps peak downlink speeds and average 2.5Mbps downlink speeds. At the edges of cells, the download speed averages 800kbps. Data rates soar higher, however, when a carrier aggregates 5MHz of spectrum, enabling data delivery at peak download speeds of 15.9Mbps and average download speeds of 6Mbps.