Ensuring mobile communication transmission quality in the year 2000

The traditional view of mobile telecommunications is to allow a customer to communicate away from his base. However, the vision for the end of the century is to make the mobile communication system the first choice for telecommunications. By the year 2000 there will be a large number of mobile systems operating in Europe, from the current analogue cellular systems to digital GSM cellular systems and potentially the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS). The challenge is to ensure that customers, be they fixed or mobile, are provided with acceptable speech quality, no matter what system they are using and what it is interconnecting to. The paper examines the speech transmission parameters which effect the perceived quality and shows how they are apportioned within the mobile systems. It then goes on to show how the transmission quality can be optimised through the transmission plan to ensure that the customer perceives acceptable speech quality