Chuck Kelsey wrote: > What do you bet none of them would give up their digital cell phones?
That leads to other questions though... 1. How many HAD analog cell phones to compare? It was a relatively smaller market due to size, but firefighters often had them. 2. How many of those that HAD analog previously, would prefer (at the same price) their digital cell phones sounded as good as their old analog phones? I understand why it's not possible to get the economies of scale at analog that digital gets, but I definitely fall into the Yes answerers for both 1 and 2 above. Yes, I had both. Yes, I'd like my digital to sound half as good as my analog brick phone did, close to what... two decades ago? Perception is everything... I found the perception of the article more interesting than their broken technical descriptions (calling analog "simplex" for example). In regards to the comments about analog vs. digital TV being better... that's going to turn into an interesting issue too. There are now articles coming out with comparison screen-shots of off-air ATSC from the network, satellite, and cable, and lo and behold... cable is now starting to compress the digital signal even more highly than the satellite providers, who were compressing just enough that they could "get away with it". How long until the content providers start licensing their content with "must not be recompressed beyond X percentage or this license is null and void" once the public figures out that what's being created and sent originally, isn't what they're receiving from their TV vendor? And of course the local ATSC broadcasts can ALSO be compressed... so the rest of the tower's digital stream can be used for other products/services... but the networks probably aren't going to allow that compression to get too high. So ATSC receivers direct to the TV will end up being the "Hi-Fi" of digital TV, and the rest (satellite and cable) will shake out where they may... or even... shake out to different "market segments"... say, one vendor doesn't compress sports as highly as movies, or vice-versa... It's coming... or maybe, already here. The article and screenshots I'm seeing is that Comcast is one of the worst "compression offenders". How many people with their shiny new HDTV sets know this? Not enough... but it'll get around... and then we'll see what the market backlash is. I only mention the above TV scenario, because the 2-way vendors are playing the same game... how much intelligibility and audio quality can we strip, before the customer squawks? (Pun intended). MOS values, test lab reports, and all of that -- simply don't matter if your CODEC removes so much analog information from the original "content provider" (a mouth), that it contributes to someone's death. It's going to continue to be a very interesting and challenging topic for years to come... in both digital "radio" and also in TV, phones, etc. I can certainly hear the difference (even on the "high-bandwidth 90K setting) between my Vonage line and the POTS line... no matter how you slice it. (Pun intended there too, since the POTS line is surely passed into a TDM network nowadays, and then -- guess where that usually goes now? IP backbone. Yep... packetized. How long until the telco IP backbone starts to see on-the-fly compression? It's already there in the IP gateways... but not too many vendors TRULY support G.729 properly yet. The specs say we all do, but the IP backbones are mostly G.711 still. We're all hovering at G.711 and wondering if the world will put up with the lower quality from a CARRIER. G.729 is popular for IP desk phones INSIDE companies that went to IP phones... but will customers let the quality slide on the backbone? No one really knows yet. The strategists do know that the customers are awfully used to the sound of their cell phones...?) Fascinating stuff. Push the "human DSP" to the limits and then back a little bit away from that point to make it hard to tell -- to save on bandwidth, in all digital products. Nate WY0X
