The Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) is undoubtedly the most successful second generation digital mobile radio system. One of the key factors for this exceptional performance is the constant evolution of the GSM systems and its derivatives DCS-1800 and PCS-1900. The objective of the book is to address new concepts in the GSM system, dealing with both standardised features as well as theoretically and technologically feasible improvements, which contribute to evolutionary changes in general. Dynamic evolution of GSM presents a platform for the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) introduction and major trends in UMTS development will be addressed in this book, in particular progress towards new radio interface. The book is the collection of individual contributions from a number of authors. The intention of the editors was to gather the most prominent specialist in the GSM area. Ongoing efforts in GSM standardisation are focused on Phase 2+ with items planned to be added gradually on demand. Being mostly independent of each other, each of them could be introduced with little impact on the rest of the system. Speech remains the prime service of cellular systems with ongoing work on spectral efficiency taking into account the trade-off between cost of the system and transmission quality. Most notable result from novel speech service implementations is the introduction of new Enhanced Full Rate (EFR) speech coder. International railway organisation (Union Internationale des Chemins de Fer - UIC) has influenced the development of Advanced Speech Call Items (ASCI).

The access network is expected to be one of the major battlegrounds of telecommunications network operators, since upgrades of the existing narrowband access network will be the critical factor in supplying multimedia broadband services in a competitive market. The future broadband access network architecture needs to be flexible enough to efficiently support the provision of a full set of broadband and narrowband services with a wide range of capacity demands. A wide range of broadband access technologies are available. Furthermore, the key issues in the upgrading of the very cost sensitive access network are financial as well as technological, both for incumbent and new entrant operators. Thus, in order to identify minimum-risk introductory strategies the economic viability of access network broadband upgrades needs to be carefully assessed. However, despite the definite need for techno-economic evaluations, very few books have been published in this field. One of the reasons might be that broadband access network upgrading only very recently gained wide recognition as a key challenge for broadband delivery. Secondly, this kind of strategic work and these studies tend to be considered rather sensitive by operators, and thus both results and methodologies are not usually readily available. Thirdly, the work reported in this book in many respects was a major pioneering effort, which quite ambitiously aimed at modelling the whole life-cycle costs and revenue streams of access network upgrades, as opposed to several other efforts, which often are limited to pure investment cost comparisons.

Organized society depends on communication of all kinds, including the ability to communicate at a distance, instantaneously. With the development of solid state electronics and its application to digital processing, telecommunication has become extremely important to large segments of American business. The in troduction of competition to serve these voice, data, and video needs has ex panded the number of service options available, and some of them are finding their way into the residential sector. From a relatively stable, mature industry, telecommunication has rapidly become a technology-driven marketplace in which a host of companies are competing for customer attention with new services and equipment. Heretofore, books on telecommunications have addressed facilities and how they work. In this book, I am seeking to provide a much broader perspective which includes information on the motives driving the business itself, on new media and services, and on advancing technologies, as well as on digital facilities and their integration into the environment of future businesses and households. Covering so wide a set of topics presents many problems, not the least of which is that the character of the information is different in each chapter, and the material will be read by persons skilled in disparate fields. It is possible to read each chapter by itself-although a reading of all of them is needed to understand the new dimensions being introduced into the telecommunication experience.