The impact of customer mobility

The rapidly increasing requirement on public telecommunications operators to satisfy the communication needs of the mobile customer, in terms of both subscriber and equipment mobility, certainly represents a factor influencing the changing `face´ of telecommunications transmission. The author discusses mobility features and the associated increase in transmitted signalling load and bandwidth economy, as observed in public land mobile networks, both of the current analogue and forthcoming digital types. In general, the classical communication path from fixed point A to fixed point B, using a fixed path over a variety of transmission systems in between, has been overtaken by mobile point A communicating with fixed or mobile point B, using a succession of transmission paths (due to the handover requirement) in the general case