(keitai-l) Re: UMTS versus W-CDMA confusion

From: Benedict Evans <ben_at_ben-evans.com>
Date: 09/01/04
Message-Id: <8363C7CC-FC43-11D8-B65C-000D93292C80@ben-evans.com>
Yes, you are confused ;-)

To simplify hugely, W-CDMA is a radio link technology whereas UMTS is a  
system, which includes a radio link but also a lot of other things as  
well (billing, roaming, authentication etc) required to make an actual  
commercial service work. Everyone in Europe and Japan building UMTS  
networks is using W-CDMA as the radio link. However, NTT DoCoMo is  
using earlier revisions of the standards to everyone else.

---------------------------
Benedict Evans
+44 7880 786 727
On 1 Sep, 2004, at 8:19 am, Heather Fraser wrote:

> Hello everybody.
>
> This is my first post here so please excuse my ignorance. I'm confused
> as to the difference between UMTS which we seem to be moving towards
> in Europe, and W-CDMA which is behind Japan's DoCoMo 3G service.
>
> Sometimes I see UMTS and W-CDMA used almost interchangeably to refer
> to 3G services in Europe. Are they one and the same?  If not, what is
> the difference?

[ excessive quoting removed by moderator ]
Received on Wed Sep 1 21:19:52 2004