The telecommunications system described herein implements a multi-rank beamformer for use in wireless systems equipped with multiple transmit and multiple receive antennas. The multi-rank beamformer uses finite-rate feedback of channel conditions to achieves close to theoretical performance indicated by the water-filling algorithm, while avoiding the computational complexity associated with space time codes. In addition, the multi-rank beamforming system described herein improves on the performance of unit rank beamforming methods by maintaining the gains over space time codes over a broader range of transmission rates.