CDMA: Less noise, more capacity

Today, we are on the threshold of an imminent Internet mobility explosion, the reasons for this being new technologies coupled with newer applications. We constantly hear the industry and the media talk about future technologies that facilitate and manage this boom in mobile Internet usage. In this context, abbreviations like CDMA, TDMA, UMTS, WCDMA, FDMA, EDGE, GPRS and 3G are very commonplace, abbreviations that may in the near future become household names.

In the journey towards understanding the various digital wireless technologies that will jettison this Internet mobility explosion, we have come to another important milestone, a technology milestone that has in its own way changed the course of communications. It is popularly called as CDMA or Code Division Multiple Access.

Today, CDMA is enabling a large number of exciting new products and services, from your palm phones to satellite communications. At present, tens of millions of subscribers are being serviced commercially by CDMA networks, and this number is rapidly growing. No wonder ‘the technology of choice’ for the next generation wireless communications is CDMA.

Let’s look at the reasons as to why CDMA should be ‘the technology of choice’ for next generation digital wireless communications, products and services.

What is CDMA?

CDMA is a digital technology that provides crystal clear voice quality plus a whole lot of exciting new products and services. Using digital encoding radio frequency (RF) techniques, CDMA provides much better and cost effective voice quality, privacy, system capacity, and flexibility than other wireless technologies. Also other enhanced services such as short messaging, e-mail and Internet access are provided.

How does CDMA work?

CDMA uses ‘spread spectrum’ technology to break up speech into small, digitized segments and then encode them to identify each call, thus a large number of users can share the same band of spectrum and greatly increase system capacity. This feature in CDMA allows cellular and PCS service providers to squeeze in more digital signals into a particular segment of the radio network.

What sets CDMA apart?

Let’s look at the features that set apart CDMA from other technologies.

Enhanced reception features

CDMA filters out background noise, cross talk and interference so that you can enjoy crystal-clear voice quality. With fewer dropped calls, enhanced security and greater reliability it becomes even more attractive. While allowing for more users to be on the system simultaneously (due to greater network capacity), it still results in fewer blocked calls for users of a CDMA network.

Wide coverage

CDMA's ‘spread spectrum’ signal technology provides the widest coverage in the wireless communications industry, allowing networks to be built with far fewer cell sites than is possible with other wireless technologies. Fewer cell sites result in reduced operating expenses, this means savings to both operators and consumers.

Security with CDMA

Enhanced security is facilitated by the CDMA technology. To begin with, the transmissions are encoded digitally, conversations are broken up into segments and each segment of conversation is assigned a code. At the receiving end, the conversation is reconstructed again using the code.

In-built Packet Data Protocols

CDMA networks have an in-built standard IP packet data protocols while other networks require costly upgrades to add new packet data equipment into their networks. They also require new packet data phones, while the standard CDMAOne phones already have in-built TCP/IP and PPP protocols.

While there’s a relentless quest for offering a whole lot of features and services to the subscriber, here CDMA digital already has an edge with a whole lot on offer like, crystal-clear voice quality, greater privacy and reliability, and enhanced call quality. CDMA supports telephone service on both 800 MHz and 1900 MHz frequencies, and also for both analog and digital modes. We have possibly all that one could ask for as a subscriber.

In the ‘war’ of digital wireless technologies, in CDMA we have an ideal "technology of choice" for the next generation of digital wireless communications.