Fixed network infrastructure for cellular networks

There have seen significant advances in cellular mobile communications with the start up of second generation services in Europe, Japan, and USA. The development of radio techniques has given improvements in spectral efficiency (capacity) and may give better speech quality over the 1st generation systems. The importance of the `fixed´ infrastructure supporting the radio channel is increasingly recognised as the element which delivers a variety of services over radio to customers for whom the radio link is merely a means of providing mobility at the required quality for their voice or data transmissions. The authors introduce some of the issues facing the designer of cellular network `fixed´ infrastructures and look to some of the future possibilities of new developments and convergence of fixed and mobile networks