Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA)

W-CDMA (UMTS)

3G sign shown in notification bar on an Android powered smartphone.

W-CDMA or WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access), along with UMTS-FDD, UTRA-FDD, or IMT-2000 CDMA Direct Spread is an air interface standard found in 3G mobile telecommunications networks. It supports conventional cellular voice, text and MMS services, but can also carry data at high speeds, allowing mobile operators to deliver higher bandwidth applications including streaming and broadband Internet access.^[1]
W-CDMA is the basis of Japan's NTT DoCoMo's FOMA service and the most-commonly used member of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) family and sometimes used as a synonym for UMTS.^[2] It uses the DS-CDMA channel access method and the FDD duplexing method to achieve higher speeds and support more users compared to most previously used time division multiple access (TDMA) and time division duplex (TDD) schemes.
While not an evolutionary upgrade on the airside, it uses the same core network as the 2G GSM networks deployed worldwide, allowing dual mode mobile operation along with GSM/EDGE; a feature it shares with other members of the UMTS family.

Development

In the late 1990s, W-CDMA was developed by NTT DoCoMo as the air interface for their 3G network FOMA. Later NTT DoCoMo submitted the specification to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as a candidate for the international 3G standard known as IMT-2000. The ITU eventually accepted W-CDMA as part of the IMT-2000 family of 3G standards, as an alternative to CDMA2000, EDGE, and the short range DECT system. Later, W-CDMA was selected as an air interface for UMTS.
As NTT DoCoMo did not wait for the finalisation of the 3G Release 99 specification, their network was initially incompatible with UMTS.^[3] However, this has been resolved by NTT DoCoMo updating their network.
Code Division Multiple Access communication networks have been developed by a number of companies over the years, but development of cell-phone networks based on CDMA (prior to W-CDMA) was dominated by Qualcomm. Qualcomm was the first company to succeed in developing a practical and cost-effective CDMA implementation for consumer cell phones and its early IS-95 air interface standard has evolved into the current CDMA2000 (IS-856/IS-2000) standard. Qualcomm created an experimental wideband CDMA system called CDMA2000 3x which unified the W-CDMA (3GPP) and CDMA2000 (3GPP2) network technologies into a single design for a worldwide standard air interface. Compatibility with CDMA2000 would have beneficially enabled roaming on existing networks beyond Japan, since Qualcomm CDMA2000 networks are widely deployed, especially in the Americas, with coverage in 58 countries as of 2006. However, divergent requirements resulted in the W-CDMA standard being retained and deployed globally. W-CDMA has then become the dominant technology with 457 commercial networks in 178 countries as of April 2012.^[4] Several cdma2000 operators have even converted their networks to W-CDMA for international roaming compatibility and smooth upgrade path to LTE.
Despite incompatibility with existing air-interface standards, late introduction and the high upgrade cost of deploying an all-new transmitter technology, W-CDMA has become the dominant standard.

Rationale for W-CDMA

W-CDMA transmits on a pair of 5 MHz-wide radio channels, while CDMA2000 transmits on one or several pairs of 1.25 MHz radio channels. Though W-CDMA does use a direct sequence CDMA transmission technique like CDMA2000, W-CDMA is not simply a wideband version of CDMA2000. The W-CDMA system is a new design by NTT DoCoMo, and it differs in many aspects from CDMA2000. From an engineering point of view, W-CDMA provides a different balance of trade-offs between cost, capacity, performance, and density^{[citation needed]}; it also promises to achieve a benefit of reduced cost for video phone handsets. W-CDMA may also be better suited for deployment in the very dense cities of Europe and Asia. However, hurdles remain, and cross-licensing of patents between Qualcomm and W-CDMA vendors has not eliminated possible patent issues due to the features of W-CDMA which remain covered by Qualcomm patents.^[5]
W-CDMA has been developed into a complete set of specifications, a detailed protocol that defines how a mobile phone communicates with the tower, how signals are modulated, how datagrams are structured, and system interfaces are specified allowing free competition on technology elements.

Deployment

The world's first commercial W-CDMA service, FOMA, was launched by NTT DoCoMo in Japan in 2001.
Elsewhere, W-CDMA deployments are usually marketed under the UMTS brand. See the main UMTS article for more information.
W-CDMA has also been adapted for use in satellite communications on the U.S. Mobile User Objective System using geosynchronous satellites in place of cell towers.

Source : Wikipedia