[justlurking]

Never heard of D-AMPS? I worked on one TDMA system in the Carolinas in the mid 90's for BellSouth. TDMA was never widely used. It sounded terrible when it loaded up with calls. Like talking through a garden hose. I don't think Bell ever went commercial with it because the audio quality was so poor. Last I heard the equipment was yanked and replaced with CDMA.

Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems (which renamed itself to Cingular, then acquired AT&T and assumed that name) deployed TDMA throughout their system. I think that AT&T (pre-acquisition) used it as well.

And yes, it was terrible when heavily loaded. It wasn't particularly good when not loaded.

At some point in the early 2000's, they replaced it all with GSM, and shutdown TDMA. They had to give "incentives" to a lot of subscribers to upgrade to a new phone.

[Thermalseeker]

And yes, it was terrible when heavily loaded. It wasn't particularly good when not loaded.

The best compliment we used to get after tuning an analog site was "you mean you're on a cell phone?" Never heard that with any digital scheme I ever worked. They all sound like crap if you axe me......