The long term evolution of UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) Terrestrial Radio Access, abbreviated as UTRA LTE, will be based on OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing). Furthermore, MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) techniques have been considered as a means for the improvement of wireless connectivity. In wireless systems, high data rates in the downlink are desirable: Furthermore, with respect to an efficient implementation, the downlink requires a thorough assessment. In particular, the Alamouti and the V-BLAST (Vertical Bell Labs Layered Space Time) schemes are seen as interesting concepts. In this communication, the authors will compare these two MIMO schemes w.r.t. the achievable performance in the UTRA LTE downlink using up to two transmit and two receive antennas. Furthermore, the authors will discuss the deployment of spatial multiplexing in the UTRA LTE downlink and will show that the performance of successive interference cancellation (SIC) based data detection techniques for MIMO-OFDM is beneficial.