National Cell Phone Plans

In order to get an efficent national cell phone provider, the technology of choice is a digital network. It's almost impossible to have a complete national service, but a digital network allows the highest coverage area per square footage over any other type of network.

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What's a digital network, and what it means to you

The first type of cellular radio technology is called analog. Analog technology was built in the early 1980's and allowed a cell phone to transmit by relaying video, voice, and data signals that are continually change through network systems. This technology is over 20 years old and has limitations. Digital cell phones uses the same analog phone radio technology, but they use it in a different way. Analog systems are not truly efficent, performance and speed lags due to analog signals cannot be compressed and translated as easily as a digital signal. This is why cable companies, cameras, satellite systems are all digital - it maximizes the use of bandwidth at it's digital disposal.

To get a little technical, digital phones translate your voice signals into binary information (1s and 0s - bytes or bits just like a computer) and then compress it. This compact compression allows between three and 10 digital cell-phone calls to occupy the same space of just a single analog call! This means that with a digital signal, 3 to 10 times the amount of data can get processed at the same time.

It order to get a digital network to work, there are some sophisticated technical processes that compress the data and translate it back again while keeping an acceptable level of voice quality. Without voice quality, who cares how efficient a network is? All of this means to you is that digital cell phones have a lot of power. This translates to the widest national cellular phone coverage area for a wireless phone.