In today’s highly-competitive 3G market, wireless broadband drives future growth while voice remains an essential element.  The trend is to evolve beyond mobile voice and offer affordable, personal telephone, Internet and multimedia access without wires to urban, sub-urban and rural areas.  These services require a reliable and mature technology that offers a long-term evolutionary path - like CDMA2000, the world’s most widely-used 3G technology with more than 463 million subscribers worldwide, 276 commercial networks and 24 more networks in deployment. 

The CDMA community continues to invest in enhancing CDMA2000 technology to further increase its value and performance in a very competitive wireless market. CDMA2000 already leads all 3G voice and broadband technologies in terms of performance, affordability and adoption, and over the next two years the voice capacity of CDMA2000 1X will increase 4 times and broadband data throughput of EV-DO will be tripled (see chart below).  With these significant investments and enhancements, 3G will be able to deliver the performance and user experience that is expected for next-generation technologies, referred to as 4G.

CDMA2000 1X enhancements will quadruple CDMA’s already-excellent voice capacity, which today already boasts twice as much voice capacity as UMTS.  The enhancements to CDMA2000 1X include a new vocoder, more antennas, interference cancellation, additional Walsh codes for more capacity and a new radio configuration with less transmit power. The benefits of these improvements include a lower cost per call thanks to greater spectral efficiencies (enabling unlimited voice offerings), as well as more efficient use of spectrum, which is vital for spectrum-constrained markets.  These enhancements will also enable opportunities to increase broadband revenue by freeing up channels that can be used for EVDO broadband data services.

CDMA2000 1xEV-DO will initially be enhanced via software upgrades and then hardware to enable spatial diversity, multi-carrier operations and other important features.  This evolution will bring EV-DO data rates from 3.1 Mbps downlink and 1.8 Mbps uplink, using EV-DO Rev. A in 1.25 MHz carrier, to 24 Mbps and 18.6 Mbps in 5 MHz, respectively. EV-DO will offer better speeds, increased sector capacity, reduced latency, advanced quality of service features, an IP-based network and backward compatibility, allowing operators to leverage their existing subscriber base and network assets to offer robust mobile broadband Internet access and related data services to customers.

3G CDMA technologies will also continue to be complemented by wider-bandwidth OFDM-based solutions.  Just as operators have expanded their service offerings with OFDM-based broadcast technologies such as T-DMB, ISDB-T, DVB-H and MFLO, 3G CDMA will also coexist and interoperate with LTE and Mobile WiMAX.  CDMA2000 will continue to offer ubiquitous high-performance mobile broadband and voice services with a defined evolution path, while OFDM solutions will augment CDMA2000 capacity by leveraging wider-bandwidths in high-teledensity areas.  Furthermore, CDMA2000 operators will be among the first enabled to augment their networks with LTE and/or Mobile WiMAX, without requiring a GSM or UMTS network deployment beforehand.

Especially for rural and sub-urban areas, there is a solution that is providing affordable network coverage for voice and broadband data services: CDMA450 (CDMA2000 in the 450 MHz frequency band). With more than 125 operators in 65 countries and 20 million subscribers, CDMA450 is the most mature and widespread solution for providing fixed and mobile telecommunication services to both urban and underserved rural markets, enabling economical voice, “always-on” broadband data and multimedia services.

CDMA2000 continues to evolve in a highly-competitive global wireless market.  Even as 3G CDMA is augmented by interoperability with wider-bandwidth solution, such as LTE and Mobile WiMAX, continued technology enhancements will ensure CDMA2000’s contribution to expanding 3G wireless voice and mobile broadband services to both emerging and underserved markets for many years to come.

Celedonio von Wuthenau
Regional Director for Latin America
CDMA Development Group