Advanced Cordless Telecommunications Service

Present analog cordless telephones suffer from lack of privacy, limited facilities and can support only a relatively low density of users. This restricts their benefits and market opportunities. Hence the need for an advanced cordless telecommunications service (ACTS). Consideration is given here to the needs of this service in terms of requirements, demand, system aspects, spectrum needs, propagation, and performance. This leads to a proposed system design for the service which is already under consideration within Europe. It uses 32 kbit/s speech encoding and time-division duplex operation to achieve both-way speech communication on a single 100 KHz-wide radio channel. A pool of radio channels are available to choose from at both base and handset in order to minimize overall interference and maximize system capacity. The addition of another aerial at only the base unit can provide the full spatial diversity improvement to both directions of transmission. The service is due for introduction in the United Kingdom in 1987.