Alright you need some education on CDMA.
Yes, Spread Spectrum technology was first used by the military for its low probability of intercept and anti-jam properties. The first use was in WW-II possibly based on Hedy Lamar's ideas.
Later it was used in several AJ systems that I worked on. PLRS, JTIDS, and DSCS III. The DSCS system first showed glimmers of the CDMA concept. Multiple ground stations shared a band and used different spreading codes.
QUALCOMM's innovation is to use orthoganal codes to efficiently share bandwidth in a near-optimal fashion. The near-far problem seemed intractable until solved by a power control loop. With the side benefit of soft handoffs.
As far as PHY layer changing, don't think so. There is a bit of money invested in base stations and phones.
As far as something "better, cheaper, faster" than CDMA, not easy. OFDM seems like a nice idea, works great on phone lines, but that is a different problem, stable, narrow channel and a lot of processing power available.
Walk around a few cities, count the number of cell phones in use, extrapolate. |
