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CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) Technology

The world is demanding more from wireless communication technologies than ever before. More People around the world are subscribing to wireless services and consumers are using their phones more frequently. Add on features of Third-Generation (3G) wireless data services and applications – such as wireless email, web, digital picture taking/sending and assisted-GPS position location.

This is where CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology fits in. CDMA consistently provides better capacity for voice and data communications than other commercial mobile technologies, allowing more subscribers to connect at any given time, and it is the common platform on which 3G technologies are built.

CDMA technology

Multiple Access : The concept behind multiple access is to permit a number of users to share a common channel. The two traditional ways of multiple access are Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) and Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA).

FDMA : In Frequency Division Multiple Access, the frequency band is divided in slots. Each user gets one frequency slot. assigned that is used at will. It could be compared to AM or FM broadcasting radio where each station has a frequency assigned. FDMA demands good filtering.

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Wireless Encryption and Security Threats

The following are the items most often at risk.

* Thieves can steal your sensitive personal and business data.

* Harmful viruses and worms can infiltrate your network, even evading your anti-virus software.

* Hackers can hijack your Wi-Fi to spam or attack others – and you could be liable.

If you don’t want your network to fall victim to snooping or people ‘borrowing’ your bandwidth, then you’re going to need to lock down your network. Luckily for you, all wireless technology has encryption built in — it’s just a matter of turning it on.

WEP Vs. WPA.

Security on wireless networks does have a flaw, though — there are two completely incompatible standards, which makes it a pain to set up a whole network to use encryption.

How did this happen? Well, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) was the original standard for encryption over 802.11 wireless networks. Back in 2001, though, a research paper was published called ‘Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4′. This paper demonstrated critical flaws in the security of WEP that made it trivial for someone to break into, if they wanted to.

Essentially, it is too easy to discover the secret ‘key’ used for WEP, and once you have the key, you can get into the network and stay in for as long as you want. People quickly recognised that it was almost useless to use WEP on their network — but by the time its weaknesses were discovered, the WEP method was built into almost every piece of wireless equipment out there.

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Personal Wireless Networking

If you’ve got a wireless network for your computers already, well, you might get a bit excited about what I’m going to say next. How would you feel if your PDA, your mobile phone, your mp3 player and almost everything else you connect to your computer could be wireless too? You’d like that? Well, it’s already a reality and has been for some time now.

Bluetooth is wireless and automatic, and has a number of interesting features that can simplify our daily lives. Bluetooth is a standard developed by a group of electronics manufacturers that allows any sort of electronic equipment — from computers and cell phones to keyboards and headphones — to make its own connections, without wires, cables or any direct action from a user. Read on…

Personal Area Network.

Using wireless networking with your personal gadgets is often called PAN, which stands for Personal Area Network. The idea is that, in the future, we’ll all have laptop computers with their batteries charged and no more need to connect any wires to them at all — you just place your Bluetooth device near the computer, and the computer sees it and can use it straightaway.

Bluetooth has been around and in-use since 1999, and it’s only getting more popular. It was designed to be secure, low cost, and easy to use from day one.

There are two classes of Bluetooth that are in popular use: class 1 and class 2. Class 2 is the most common and cheaper standard, allowing you to use a device that is up to 10 metres (32 feet) away. Class 1 is rarer, but you can still find devices that use it easily enough, and it has ten times the range: 100 metres or 320 feet.

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How SMS Works

SMS, or Short Message Service, is the technology behind what we often refer to as ‘text messages’ or ‘SMSes’, as well as what allows for news alerts on cellular phones. In recent years SMS has ballooned to over a 50 billion dollar industry and is quickly taking the communications world by storm.

Short Message Service actually refers to a framework that uniquely allows computers, or in this case phones, to communicate with each other without the need of a central hub. With SMS, phones can find each other, send short packets of information back and forth, and do it all without any central computer to guide them. But because the system does not rely upon fixed lines like a land based telephone system does, the amount of information that can be sent at one time is limited in size. This depends on the language spoken, but for English letters this typically means around 150 characters (Chinese and Japanese letters are limited to 70).

Quite recently, however, new developments in the technology have allowed for even longer messages to be sent. Long or Concatenated SMS is a development that allows multiple messages to be combined to form a single message. In effect, what happens is that your phone actually sends out a few smaller messages and then the receiving phone simply compiles those messages so that for users on both ends, it appears as though the message were cohesive. While there are some limitations, the brilliance behind SMS is that because there is no need for central hubs, and thus the system can be expanded indefinitely without any concerns of it slowing down or becoming more expensive.

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