Performance of a digital cellular experimental testbed

A digital cellular radio experimental system has been developed for the North American market. It has been demonstrated for CTIA in Los Angeles in December 1988. After describing the experiment TDMA (time-division multiple access) system, the authors present field-test results. From the demonstration it was concluded that the speech quality of the digital system was at least as good as for the analog reference under all conditions. During the time of implementation of the testbed, work was done on an 8.7 kb/s speech codec, resulting in quality as good as for the 13 kb/s codec. This means a three-times direct capacity improvement in a 3-split TDMA system.<
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