Friday, May 28, 2004

Of Cell Phones, Signal Quality, and Loud Voices.

Was watching TV today and saw this commercial for some company's wireless service. They where showing a train full of cell users with signal quality bars over their head and one guy had really bad signal. This guy was basically screaming into his cellphone.

Now. There are 3 things wrong with this one. #1, I absolutely HATE people who yell into thier cellphones. That's just a personal pet peeve. But #2 is that ALL modern cell phones are digital. Now if you didn't know, digital cell phones use error corrected packets of data to carry the voice signal. When the signal quality fades, the packets pick up large amounts of errors, and when the packets are too corrupted to correct, they are dropped. This causes breaks in the voice stream. Yelling will not prevent packet loss. And #3, the problem of overmodulation. Basically because we're talking a digital stream, there is maximum limit to the sound intensity. If you go beyond this limit, the quantitizer maxes out and wont go any higher. This leads to clipping (The squaring off of loud sounds) in the audio stream.

But everyone seems to yell when they begin to loose signal. The part that confuses me ('cause I occasionally catch MYSELF doing it...) is WHY we do it...

Ring ring!!!

Mood: Confused