Lecture Series in Mobile Telecommunications and Networks (1583KB)

From plain old Telephony to flawless
mobile audio communication
Professor Dr Ing Peter Vary
Institute of Communication Systems and Data Processing, Germany
First of all, I would like to say thank you: it is a great honour for me to give a talk here in the Royal Academy of
Engineering, which I am very pleased to do.
Speech communication is likely to remain the most important service in mobile communications and we may discuss
that later, but that statement is not very exciting because our expectations are not too high. From experience, we know
that a phone sounds like a phone, because it is a phone. We know, and it is obviously a matter of fact, that a mobile
phone never sounds better than a fixed-line phone, because it is mobile, and it is wireless technology. In my talk,
however, I will aim to convince you that this might not be true in the future, or even in the near future.
The €1 mobile phone
The state of the art phone is a very smart device. It is a telephone, a camera, an mp3 player, an FM radio, a calendar, a
pocket calculator, a game box, and it is – or it seems to be – cheap, at just €1. The question is, is there still room for
improvement? €1 is not too much. Our question should read: are there some improvements for which the customer is
willing to pay more than €1? That might depend on the customer.
To improve the phone, or to make it better, there are different criteria. One approach has been taken by the company,
Vertu. This is an independent company belonging to Nokia and you can buy these nice phones: the price starts here at
€20,000, rising to €30,000, €40,000 and €50,000. You can buy these in the shop at Frankfurt Airport, for example, where
you buy Rolex watches. However, within the case, there is no Rolex or anything like that – it is just a plain Nokia phone.
iPhone “Princess Plus” - €144,000
Some people like to have more than just a plain phone – they like the iPhone. For those, there is also a solution by an
Austrian designer. There is the Princess Plus at €144,000 but, inside, it is the same technology as a standard iPhone.
iPhone 3G “Kings Button” - €1,790,000
If that is not what you are looking for, because you would like
to spend a little more, then this is probably the top iPhone
you can buy at the moment. It has a lot of diamonds around
the frame, and the central button is a very big diamond.
Amazingly, the company does very well. It has 500
employees – the company is Vertu – but the market is
probably niche. [Laughter] There are a few clusters of
customers in some regions of the world, as you can imagine.
So this problem seems to have been solved and therefore I
would like to address a different problem: to improve the
phone not in terms of the outer appearance, but inside.
I would like to discuss improving the audio quality.
46 The Royal Academy of Engineering