Next CDMA standard Ultra Mobile Broadband specification published

The CDMA Development Group (CDG) and the Third Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2) have announced the publication of the Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) air interface specification, 3GPP2 C.S0084-0 v2.0.

It is expected that the UMB specification will be quickly converted into an official global standard by the 3GPP2 organizational partners, which include the Association of Radio Industries and Businesses (ARIB) in Japan, China Communications Standards Association (CCSA), Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) in North America, Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA) in Korea, and the Telecommunications Technology Committee (TTC) in Japan.

TIA plans to designate the UMB standard as TIA-1121. The publication of this specification marks the world's first IP-based mobile broadband standard to enable peak download data rates of 288 Mbps in a 20 MHz bandwidth. Uploads rates are expected to reach 75 Mbps.

UMB enables the transfer of native IP, variable length, data packets at speeds that are orders of magnitude higher than what is commercially available today. It is the latest member of the family of CDMA2000 standards.

The standard uses the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) solution, sophisticated control and signaling mechanisms, radio resource management (RRM), adaptive reverse link (RL) interference management, and advanced antenna techniques, such as Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO), Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) and beamforming

To support ubiquitous and universal access, UMB supports inter-technology hand-offs and seamless operation with existing CDMA2000 1X and 1xEV-DO systems.

UMB is expected to become commercially available on a global basis in 1H2009.