SUMMARYThis paper presents the BER performance of the physical layer of the code division multiple access 1x Evolution Data Only (EVDO) standard for different data transmission formats, and shows the improvement on the BER performance of the EVDO system over intersymbol interference channel by adapting the low complexity turbo equalization scheme at the receiver. The radio frequency, channel condition, and mobile user data speeds were extracted from a mobile user with a drive experiment on a live wireless EVDO network. Then, the real data were utilized to simulate the actual mobile user's data speeds in our simulations to show the overall BER performance of the EVDO system application. The simulation results are shown over Gaussian and Proakis A channels and the results indicate that significant intersymbol interference cancellation is obtained with an adapted code division multiple access system and the advantages of turbo equalization on the EVDO system are discussed in this research. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.