We hosted an exciting webinar with Fierce Wireless a few days ago. We introduced a new format, in which our audience was the focus, and we dedicated most of the session to their CDMA/EV-DO questions. The response was very enthusiastic – it was a constant flow of questions that were either pre-submitted before the webinar or were asked live. After the seminar, the flow of queries continued on our Twitter and Facebook pages.
The questions were primarily focused on three themes: (1) What’s up with Rev. B? (2) Where is the EV-DO Evolution headed? (3) Why 1X Advanced, when all the action is in data?
Many of those questions centered around LTE, which is now knocking at the door. The answers that emerged from the discussion painted a clear and exciting picture of what’s next.
Multicarrier, the first phase of Rev. B, is already commercial and is gathering momentum with many major operators such as KDDI and China Telecom publicly announcing their deployment plans. Multicarrier is a simple software upgrade that triples data rates. And it offers similar capacity (spectral efficiency) as LTE while using the same amount of spectrum.
Next up after Multicarrier is the Rev. B hardware upgrade, which further increases data rates and capacity. Following that is DO Advanced, which brings in a new dimension of enhancements that exploit inherent unevenness in data demand to increase network capacity and enhance the user experience where and when needed.
On the voice side, 1X Advanced quadruples the already excellent voice capacity of CDMA2000. Operators can use this increased capacity either to offer more voice services or, more importantly, to free-up spectrum to support the exploding demand for data services on their EV-DO deployments.
So, the natural question was (and is), “With LTE knocking at the door, what does all this mean?” Well, the answer is that LTE will complement CDMA and EV-DO. LTE is an excellent option for operators that have access to new, wider bandwidth spectrum (10 MHz or more) to augment data capacity for their EV-DO networks, especially in dense urban areas. LTE will rely on the 1X and 1X Advanced enhancements for voice services, and Rev. B for ubiquitous data coverage outside focused LTE coverage areas. Again, LTE will complement CDMA and EV-DO.
You can listen to the webinar at http://bit.ly/963c8G. If your questions are still not answered, feel free to connect with us on our Web page at www.qualcomm.com/technology, or follow us on Twitter @qualcomm_tech or post your questions to this blog.
