Spread spectrum is a method of transmitting information over radio waves. It chops up the available spectrum into frequencies and hops from frequency to frequency, transmitting a small amount of data on each hop.

It uses the available radio spectrum very efficiently because many different logical channels of information may hop around using the same spectrum area. Because of this, different devices will only interfere with each other if they both happen to transmit on the same frequency at the exact same time. In the case of voice content this simply sounds like very low-level static on the line. In the case of data content, the data that was interfered with is simply retransmitted on the next hop.

There are two different algorithms (or schemes) used today to perform spread spectrum radio communications. They are DSSS and FHSS.