TIA committee rates AT&T CDMA wireless as best in class

MORRISTOWN, N.J. -- August 24, 1995 -- AT&T Network Systems' reputation as a leader in digital wireless voice quality was bolstered by recent evaluation and selection of the company's new technology for wireless communications standards by the Telecommunications Industry Association's (TIA) Engineering Committee TR45.

AT&T's new eight kilobits-per-second (kbps) variable rate digital voice encoder, or vocoder, was selected by the Engineering Committee's rigorous tests for the Enhanced Variable Rate Coder (EVRC). These tests were designed to evaluate the EVRC for use with CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) IS-95-based systems.

Of the candidates that were evaluated, AT&T's EVRC was rated best for its all-around excellent performance under various conditions, such as clarity in the presence of background noise, and balance between male and female voice quality.

In collaboration with other committee members, AT&T will now contribute to completing the standardization activity quickly, so that the technology is readily available to end users.

The current IS-95 CDMA-based product uses the present-generation eight kbps vocoder to compress voice and send it over the air between the terminal and the base station, which puts the call on the wireless network. However, while digital systems eliminate the "pops" and "crackles" of analog systems, this new eight kbps encoding scheme significantly improves the sound quality available to CDMA-based systems.

"This EVRC technology is the latest innovation based on the fundamental advances in speech processing research at AT&T Bell Laboratories," said George Zysman, chief technical officer, AT&T Network Systems network wireless systems business unit. "Our experience in analog and digital cellular technology has given us keen insights into the factors affecting wireless voice quality."

AT&T Network Systems is one of the world's largest manufacturers of network telecommunications equipment. It offers communications service providers virtually everything they need to build and operate their landline and wireless networks.