Commercial Development
The founders of QUALCOMM realized that CDMA technology could be used in
commercial cellular communications to make even better use of the radio spectrum than
other technologies. They developed the key advances that made CDMA suitable for
cellular, then demonstrated a working prototype and began to license the technology to
telecom equipment manufacturers.
The first CDMA networks were commercially launched in 1995, and provided
roughly 10 times more capacity than analog networks - far more than TDMA or GSM.
Since then, CDMA has become the fastest-growing of all wireless technologies, with
over 100 million subscribers worldwide. In addition to supporting more traffic, CDMA
brings many other benefits to carriers and consumers, including better voice quality,
broader coverage and stronger security.
The world is demanding more from wireless communication technologies than ever
before. More people around the world are subscribing to wireless services and consumers
are using their phones more frequently. Add in exciting Third-Generation (3G) wireless
data services and applications - such as wireless email, web, digital picture
taking/sending and assisted-GPS position location applications - and wireless networks
are asked to do much more than just a few years ago. And these networks will be asked to
do more tomorrow.
This is where CDMA technology fits in. CDMA 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.
CDMA is a "spread spectrum" technology, allowing many users to occupy the same
time and frequency allocations in a given band/space. As its name implies, CDMA
assigns unique codes to each communication to differentiate it from others in the same
spectrum.