Both CDMA and TDMA, Jacobs explained, worked by sending multiple conversations over a single radio wave. CDMA, however, could also take advantage of natural pauses in the way people speak to allow more conversations simultaneously. This is known as “spread spectrum,” whereby each call is assigned a code that is scrambled over a wide frequency spectrum and then reconstructed at the receiving end, thus allowing multiple users to occupy the same spectrum simultaneously, using very complicated software coding and other techniques.
