1xRTT - Single Carrier Radio Transmission Technology

What is 1xRTT?

Short for single carrier (1x) radio transmission technology, a 3G wireless technology based on the CDMA platform. 1xRTT has the capability of providing ISDN-like speeds of up to 144 Kbps.

CDMA2000 is a family of third-generation (3G) mobile telecommunications standards that use CDMA, a multiple access scheme for digital radio, to send voice, data, and signalling data (such as a dialed telephone number) between mobile phones and cell sites. It is the second generation of CDMA digital cellular.

CDMA (code division multiple access) is a mobile digital radio technology that transmits streams of bits and whose channels are divided using codes (PN sequences). CDMA permits many radios to share the same frequency channel. Unlike TDMA (time division multiple access), a different technique used in GSM and D-AMPS, 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 multiple access (FDMA).

CDMA2000 has a relatively long technical history, and remains compatible with the older CDMA telephony methods (such as cdmaOne) first developed by Qualcomm, a commercial company, and holder of several key international patents on the technology.

The CDMA2000 standards CDMA2000 1x, CDMA2000 1xEV-DO, and CDMA2000 1xEV-DV are approved radio interfaces for the ITU's IMT-2000 standard and a direct successor to 2G CDMA, IS-95 (cdmaOne). CDMA2000 is standardized by 3GPP2.

CDMA2000 is a registered trademark of the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA-USA) in the United States, not a generic term like CDMA. (This is similar to how TIA has branded their 2G CDMA standard, IS-95, as cdmaOne.)

CDMA2000 is an incompatible competitor of the other major 3G standard UMTS. It is defined to operate at 400 MHz, 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1700 MHz, 1800 MHz, 1900 MHz, and 2100 MHz.