PDC
In Japan, the second-generation TDMA cellular system is very similar to NA-TDMA and is kno wn
as PDC. This stands for either Pacific Digital Cellular or Personal Digital Cellular. The standard
was defined by RCR, which later became ARIB, the Japanese standards organization. The first
service was launched in March 1993 by NTT DoCoMo, and by 2003 the system had over
61 million subscribers. The system is used nowhere else in the world, and is now being phased
out with the advent of 3G services. Both UMTS and CDMA2000 are be ing rolled out.
PDC uses a 25-kHz carrier spacing with three time slots. The modulation used is pi/4-DQPSK, and
this enables it to carry low bit-rate 11.2-kb/s and 5.6-kb/s (half-rate) vocoder data. The signalling
is very similar ...