Personal Digital Cellular - Definition and Overview

Personal Digital Cellular (PDC) is a 2G mobile phone standard developed and used exclusively in Japan.

Like D-AMPS and GSM, PDC uses TDMA. The standard was defined by the RCR (later became ARIB) in April 1991, and NTT DoCoMo launched its Digital MOVA service in March 1993. PDC uses 25 kHz carrier, 3 time slots, pi/4-DQPSK modulation and low bit-rate 11.2 kb/s and 5.6 kb/s (half-rate) voice codecs.

PDC is implemented the in 800 MHz (downlink 810-888 MHz, uplink 893-958 MHz), and 1.5 GHz (downlink 1477-1501 MHz, uplink 1429-1453 MHz) bands. The air interface is defined in RCR STD-27 and the core network MAP by JJ-70.10. NEC and Ericsson are the major network equipment manufacturers.

The services include voice (full and half-rate), supplementary services (call waiting, voice mail, three-way calling, call forwarding, and so on), data service (up to 9.6 kb/s CSD), and packet-switched wireless data (up to 28.8 kb/s PDC-P).

PDC has 61.817 million subscribers as of end December 2003 but is slowly being phased out in favor of 3G technologies like W-CDMA and cdma2000.