PCS (personal communications service) is a wireless phone service similar to cellular telephone service but emphasizing personal service and extended mobility. It's sometimes referred to as digital cellular (although cellular systems can also be digital). Like cellular, PCS is for mobile users and requires a number of antennas to blanket an area of coverage. As a user moves around, the user's phone signal is picked up by the nearest antenna and then forwarded to a base station that connects to the wired network. The phone itself is slightly smaller than a cellular phone. According to Sprint, PCS is now available to 230 million people.
The "personal" in PCS distinguishes this service from cellular by emphasizing that, unlike cellular, which was designed for car phone use and coverage of highways and roads, PCS is designed for greater user mobility. It generally requires more cell transmitters for coverage, but has the advantage of fewer blind spots. Technically, cellular systems in the United States operate in the 824-849 megahertz (MHz) frequency bands; PCS operates in the1850-1990 MHz bands.
Several technologies are used for PCS in the United States, including Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), and Global System for Mobile (GSM) communication. GSM is more commonly used in Europe and elsewhere.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is an automated telephony system that interacts with callers, gathers information and routes calls to the appropriate recipient. An IVR system (IVRS) accepts a combination of voice telephone input and touch-tone keypad selection and provides appropriate responses in the form of voice, fax, callback, e-mail and perhaps other media.
An IVR system consists of telephony equipment, software applications, a database and a supporting infrastructure. Common IVR applications include:
* Bank and stock account balances and transfers
* Surveys and polls
* Office call routing
* Call center forwarding
* Simple order entry transactions
* Selective information lookup (movie schedules, etc.)
An IVR application provides pre-recorded voice responses for appropriate situations, keypad signal logic, access to relevant data and, potentially, the ability to record voice input for later handling. Using computer telephony integration (CTI), IVR applications can hand off a call to a human being who can view data related to the caller at a display.
Answered by
Nagendra
at
8:07 AM on June 09, 2008