CdmaOne

cdmaOne, most often simply referred to as CDMA, is a 2G digital cellular technology. It was the commercial name for Interim Standard 95 (IS-95), a technology that was developed by Qualcomm and later adopted as a standard by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA). cdmaOne used code-division multiple access (CDMA), a multiple access scheme for digital radio, to send voice, data and signaling data (such as a dialed telephone number) between mobile telephones and cell sites. CDMA transmits streams of bits (PN codes). CDMA permits several radios to share the same frequencies. Unlike time-division multiple access (TDMA), a competing system used in 2G GSM, all radios can be active all the time, because network capacity does not directly limit the number of active radios. Since larger numbers of phones can be served by smaller numbers of cell-sites, CDMA-based standards have a significant economic advantage over TDMA-based standards, or the oldest cellular standards that used frequency-division multiplexing. In North America, the technology competed with Digital AMPS (IS-136, most often simply called "TDMA"), a TDMA-based standard, as well as with the TDMA-based GSM. It was supplanted by IS-2000 (CDMA2000), a later CDMA-based standard. cdmaOne's technical history is reflective of both its birth as a Qualcomm internal project, and the world of then-unproven competing digital cellular standards under which it was developed. The term IS-95 generically applies to the earlier set of protocol revisions, namely P_REV's one through five. P_REV=1 was developed under an ANSI standards process with documentation reference J-STD-008.