How is CDMA superior to TDMA?
It supports more calls in the same spectrum, and it dynamically allocates bandwidth more easily. Spectrum is extremely expensive; it has to be purchased from various governmental licensing authorities at auction, and sometimes these auctions have involved billions of dollars (or equivalent monetary value in other currencies). It represents a considerable investment by a carrier. Generally speaking, CDMA will carry between two and three times as many calls simultaneously as TDMA in the same amount of bandwidth. This is due to something known as “frequency reuse” .The other major advantage of CDMA is dynamic allocation of bandwidth. To understand this, it’s important to realize that in this context in CDMA, “bandwidth” refers to the ability of any phone to get data from one end to the other. It doesn’t refer to the amount of spectrum used by the phone, because in CDMA every phone uses the entire spectrum of its carrier whenever it is transmitting or receiving.
