The described technology is generally directed towards adaptively changing which transmission scheme a user equipment is to use based on a Doppler metric (e.g. Doppler frequency) as evaluated against a threshold Doppler value. A network instructs a user equipment to use a Rank-1 precoder cycling transmission scheme if the Doppler metric of user equipment is above a threshold value, or to use a closed loop MIMO transmission scheme if the user equipment has a Doppler metric below the threshold value. The network can instruct the user equipment via a suitable message, or by switching off TPMI and notifying the user equipment thereof.