Fixed residential broadband access evolution is being driven primarily by strong demands for increasing bandwidth to support a variety of user services. Competing access technologies include cable, DSL and wireless. Residential wireless service implies non-line of sight (Non-LOS) operation with blocking by foliage, terrain and buildings. A 2.5-2.7 GHz (so called MMDS)block is seen as an appropriate band for this service.

The key technology challenges for broadband MMDS wireless access are: (a) High spectrum efficiency in BPS per Hz per Cell (BHC), (b) Non-LOS operation, (c) High scalability through a cellular frequency reuse network. This talk will survey key space-time wireless techniques such as diversity, interference cancellation and spatial multiplexing to enable high performance. The nature of the wireless channel in fixed broad band systems and the specific space-time techniques that exploit this channel will be described.