Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), essentially identical to coded OFDM (COFDM) and discrete multi-tone modulation (DMT), is a frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) scheme used as a digital multi-carrier modulation method. A large number of closely-spaced orthogonal sub-carriers are used to carry data. The data is divided into several parallel data streams or channels, one for each sub-carrier. Each sub-carrier is modulated with a conventional modulation scheme (such as quadrature amplitude modulation or phase-shift keying) at a low symbol rate, maintaining total data rates similar to conventional single-carrier modulation schemes in the same bandwidth.