Frank - << Pure analog is the best you can get, the digital cellular and PCS (they both use the same technologies, just a different frequencies) digitize your voice and then compress it, similar to zipping a big file on your PC. Except in the case of cellular (and PCS) the compression is lossy, that is to say you don't get back all the sounds when you reconvert to analog again at the receiver's end.>>
Just for further clarification, from another engineer. Digital does have some qualitative differences:
1) Better capacity for the same priced ground stations equals cheaper calls. Analog cell phones can only compete because they have a payed-off infrastructure. But, eventually replacement costs will force them to move to digital, or lose out.
2) Digital actually produces a cleaner sounding signal when the signal is moderately good. Analog, on the other hand, will show signs of this 'moderateness' - as echoes or noise or, ... . However, at some point when the signal drops below a threshold, digital falls apart almost completely, while analog will still be intelligible, even if with annoying noise.
3) Digital voice compression is indeed lossy, but the newest systems are specially designed to transmit voices, so for conversations it works fine at reasonable compressions. However, other sounds are likely to come across garbled in digital voice compression. Analog, since it is uncompressed, does not have these concerns. (Note, this is very similar in effect to the digital video compression used by DirecTV. It is lossy, but no one would deny that they majority of the time it is a better picture than analog cable.)
Clark
PS I also am disappointed at the apparent lack of blossomming sales that was supposed to occur with the introduction of PCS. However, sales have still grown pretty substantially, just not as much as I would have expected given the boom in PCS phone sales. |
