Universal Wireless Communications, or UWC-136, is a proposed standard from the Universal Wireless Communication Consortium (UWCC) - a consortium of more than 85 telecommunications carriers and wireless product vendors - for a 3G (third-generation) wireless communication system. Universal Wireless Communications (UWC-136) is part of the International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000) initiative from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The UWCC promotes UWC-136 as a competing IMT-2000 standard.
UWC-136 is a pure Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) technology that is designed to be backward compatible with the existing IS-136 TDMA digital cellular phone system defined by the ANSI-136 and IS-41 standards and still widely used in North America.
Implementation of UWC-136 is planned in phases by first upgrading existing IS-136 TDMA systems to IS-136+ to provide data rates of 43.2 Kbps over standard 30-kHz channels. Then IS-136+ will be upgraded to IS-136HS, which is the high-speed component of UWC-136. Eventually UWC-136 will provide packet-data services at speeds of up to 384 Kbps for wide-area coverage and up to 2 Mbps for in-building coverage. Voice communication on this system will be high-fidelity wireline quality, comparable to that of Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN).