What is CDMA?

CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) is a packet – based wireless – access technology that was developed by the United States Department of Defence, improved and commercialized by Qualcomm. It allows many users to occupy the same time and frequency allocations in a given band/space. Hence it is also sometimes being referred to as spread spectrum technology.

CDMA is one of the major global wireless mobile technology standards. It is used in certain cellular phone systems and in some wireless local-area networks. It consistently provides better capacity for voice and data communications than other commercial mobile technologies, allowing more subscribers to connect at any given time, and it is the common platform on which 3G technologies are built.

In a nutshell, it is a form of multiplexing enabling multiple access that doesn’t divide up the channel by time or frequency but instead encodes data with a certain code associated with a channel and uses the constructive interference properties of the signal medium to perform the multiplexing. It also refers to digital cellular telephony system that makes use of multiple access scheme such as those pioneered by Qualcomm.

The major benefit of CDMA is increased capacity over 20 times that of analog service. It increases more capacity through more efficient use of spectrum, specifically; it permits many radios to share the same frequency channel.

The two dominant IMT-2000 standards, CDMA2000 and WCDMA, are based on CDMA. CDMA2000 represents a family of ITU-approved, IMT-2000 (3G) standards and this includes CDMA2000 1X and CDMA2000 1xEV technologies