The product was launched in January and although a majority of the public had hoped that it would be on sale soon, the communications company Acting Managing Director Amon Dlamini said this could happen towards the end of March. The much hyped about “fixed wireless” is infact CDMA technology which the country’s sole fixed telecominication provider was hoping to launch this month.

How it works
What happens in when your mobile phone handset is a CDMA phone, the voice or data calls are spread out across the entire available wireless frequency bandwidth and use frequencies 1.25MHz wide, rather than being allocated channels either by time or frequency.

he cellular information of either voice or other data (like picture messaging for example) is split up into small packets and transmitted to the recipient in binary code of 1s and 0s (or it wouldn‘t be digital), and each packet has a spread code embedded within it. This cellular phone code is exclusive to each cell user and call, and every packet of data can therefore be assigned correctly when being reassembled at the receiving cell phone and all other data with different codes is ignored.

Also referred to as wide band spread spectrum, CDMA cellular encoding makes sure that all the cellular transmitted data is correctly recognized and duly assigned, without interference from all the other cell phone signals which all have their own individual codes to be recognized.

Interference from other cellular users within the system is not a problem unless the number of phone users reaches a saturation point which disrupts the voice coding system.

Another thing about CDMA cellular technology is that more than one (actually three) cell phone towers can be used at any one time, as the cell phone can choose which site is giving the best signal, or choose to blend the signal from two or more. This cell phone process is known as `soft handoff’ and is an ability unique to CDMA cell phones.