perterra said:
At one time a guy at AT&T told me Nokia was going to going to bring into production digital bag phones with 3 watts. If I could wait about 3 months it would be on the market. I waited 3 months, called and nobody had any idea of what I was talking about. Of course it could also be because it went from someone with a distinct Carolinas accent, to a lady who answered the phone with, "good mornin, whats'a matta wit you phone, and what can I do to heppa you" (I started laughing, I thought she was puttin me own, she wasnt) I had been having connection problems after getting switched from amps to whatever other band they had chosen. My old bag phone was great, had an external anttenna hooked up and most people would ask if I was in the office when I called.
Technology may be responible for improvement on many things, but when it comes to cell phones its gone down the crapper.
There were some 3watt digitals out. All of them that I saw were made by Motorola or Harris (and the Harris was a Motorola knock off that most of the parts were sourced from Motorola). That was around 86 when the Olympics were in Atlanta.
There were a few reasons why they never really took off. Bag phones suck to carry. The trend was going to hand held so that you could use the phone all the time and stick it in your pocket instead of carrying a 5lb bag.
The other reason is capacity. In 86 the US was nearly 10 years behind in technology to Europe. You can thank the FCC and government regulations for that. This was the requirement that the carriers keep Analog viable. Most of the world never used TDMA or CDMA. the problem is GSM is very complicated and at the time nobody could figure out how to make Analog jive with GSM in a small hand held device. So they trimmed down GSM into a more simple technology's of TDMA and CDMA. That was key because the trend in the rest of the world was hand held and we were following it.
Like I pointed out TDMA is actually trimmed down GSM that the rest of the world went to. CDMA is a variant of that. This one step allowed the carriers to triple capacity with out tripling the quantity of towers. The users were exceeding capacity and with government regulations as they were towers could not be built at a fast enough rate to keep up with capacity needs.
TDMA= Time Division Multiple Access. What happens is three (in theory up to 6) uses share a channel by rotating who gets to broadcast. They do that by taking what you say turning it into a digital signal, cutting it into small pieces, compressing it and transmitting it in bursts. It can be related to how Ethernet works. Packets of data.
CDMA= Code Division Multiple Access. Again it allows three (and up to 6 in theory) different users to share a single channel but it does it by assigning a "Code" to each user. On he other end only the conversation with the same code is listened to and the rest is ignored.
Now why neither of these technologies when to a 6 user per channel design is on TDMA they could not build fast enough devices for a practical price to do it. On CDMA Noise floor is critical and the noise floor with 6 users per channel exceed the sensitivity that a reasonably priced receiver could handle.
So here we are just now catching up with GSM and UMTS.
So back to the original topic...Not enough people would buy a 3watt bag phone to make it worth building. So the decision was made to regulate the hole "digital system" down to .6 watts. That allowed for battery battery times and lighter weight products that the consumer trend was for.
Another reason why Analog had a more "warm" sound is it was analog. You talk in analog and analog replicates that very well. Digital loose a percentage of what you say and guesses what was lost so its just a bit off. The sound quality never had anything to do with the output power. In most urban areas a 3watt capable phone would be brodcasting at the same power ratings as a .6 watt and held.
There were some "booster install kits for hand held that allowed an Analog and a TDMA product to have 3 watt capability but most people don't realize that if you were on a Digital call the booster was shut off. All the gain in reception was the external antenna.