On Fri, 15 Jul 2016 13:17:48 -0400, BPVeW›„«¸ï¼*ｉｇｈｔｙ ¸Ž ï¼·ï½�ｎｎï½�ｂｅ«·
›„fZSSO wrote:


Digital cellphone system is almost like digital TV. You either get it
100% or you don't get it at all, because the signals are all in ones and
zeros.

That ain't right---you can see how it really works with progressive GIFs.
Basically, you send the crude approximation of your signal (image in this
case) first, and then if you have bandwidth/time/money/patience you show
more detail. A good example is he

https://blog.codinghorror.com/content/images/
uploads/2005/12/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776fcadb970c-pi.gif

You could think of this as using very low bandwidth aka low bitrate
connection in the beginning (sending just few 'bits' of the image), and
then increasing the number of sent bits per unit time to get more detail.

Ed was talking about the phone companies using adaptive audio bitrate,
which is how the phone company manages their limited aggregate cell tower
bandwidth. They basically can serve small number of customers at high
bitrate that gives very good sound quality. If, however, they get a lot
of cellphones trying to use an oversubscribed tower, they run out of
bandwidth. They COULD drop the call (drop from 100% to nothing at all, as
you say), but the customers tend to complain loudly about that.

Instead, the phone company came up with a brilliant idea: they switch
everyone to a low, crappy bitrate, so they can handle a lot of cellphones
at lower quality. It's much harder for the customers to quantify their
complaints now ("maybe momma is just mumbling"). Geniuses.