Each transceiver is supposed to handle about five square miles, but field reports show some lack of consistency. Current service include portions of Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St. Sound bits or data are split into data packets that are encoded with unique identification tags. The cell phone or data device receives all of the data packets but only reassembles those packets with the correct code, and transforms the broken-up bits of data into useful sound and data. This allows more traffic for a finite number of available frequencies than analog or the other digital standards.
Data can only flow in their assigned time slots.
It couples a Palm Pilot with an Ericsson cell phone. Phone is larger than most handsets. Car kit is prohibitively expensive. As a tri-mode phone, can access analog, digital and satellite service. Since the data is encoded in packets, a lost connection does not require re-sending the entire file, and the system keeps track of the information still to be sent.