Cell Phone Development History & Applications

The primary differenence between 1G and 2G networks is that 2G networks use digital radio signals as apposed to analog signals.  A digital signal uses descrete values to transmit information from one point to another rather than using a continuos range of values as the analog system.   Basically, the digital signal transmits two types of pulses, one represents a 1 (pulse present), and one represents a 0 (pulse absent).  These digital signals are combined into a packets to represent the information being transmitted. Okay, so what’s the big deal anyway.  Well, the inherent issues with regard to the transmission has to do with the "interference" or "distortion" of the signal during transmission.  In analog circuits,  due to the nature of how the information is encoded, makes them much more suceptible to distortion than digital circuits,  since a small change in the signal can represent a large change in the information it represents.  Digital circuits, on the other hand, are transmitting only two distinct values, can reduce the distortion by using a range a values to represent either a "1" or "0". The primary advantages of 2G technology was the increase in system capacity as digital voice data could be compressed so that more calls could be packed into the same amount of radio bandwidth than with analog voice data.  Digital systems also required less battery power for transmissions, so batteries could be smaller.  Digital voice also allowed for error checking which resulted in better sound quality. 

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