54 QUALITY OF SERVICE AND TELECOMMUNICATION IMPAIRMENTS

a VU meter is used to measure the level of a voice signal, it is difficult to exactly

equate VU and dBm. One of the problems, of course, is that speech transmission is
characterized by spurts of signal. However, a good approximation relating VU to dBm
is the following formula:

Average power of a telephone talker VU 1.4(dBm). ( 3 .6 )

In the telecommunication network, telephone channels are often multiplexed at the

first serving exchange. When the network was analog, the multiplexers operated in the
frequency domain and were called frequency division multiplexers (FDM). Voice chan-
nel inputs were standardized with a level of either 15 dBm or 16 dBm, and the
outputs of demultiplexers were +7 dBm. These levels, of course, were test-tone levels.
In industrialized and postindustrialized nations, in nearly every case, multiplexers are
digital. These multiplexers have an overload point at about +3.17 dBm0. The digital
reference signal is 0 dBm on the analog side using a standard test tone between 1013
Hz and 1022 Hz (Ref. 4).

3. 5 ECHO AND SINGING

Echo and singing are two important impairments that impact QoS. Echo is when a talker
hears her/ his own voice delayed. The annoyance is a function of the delay time (i.e., the
time between the launching of a syllable by a talker and when the echo of that syllable
is heard by the same talker). It is also a function of the intensity (level) of the echo, but
to some lesser extent. Singing is audio feedback. It is an ear-splitting howl, much like
the howl one gets by placing a public address microphone in front of a loudspeaker. We
will discuss causes and cures of echo and singing in Chapter 4.

REVIEW EXERCISES

1. Define signal-to-noise ratio.

2. Give signal-to-noise ratio guidelines at a receiving device for the following three
media: (1) voice, (2) video-TV, and (3) data. Base the answer on where a typical
customer says the signal is very good or excellent.

3. Why do we use a sinusoidal test tone when we measure S/ N on a speech channel

rather than just the speech signal itself?
4. The noise level of a certain voice channel is measured at 39 dBm and the test-
tone signal level is measured at +3 dBm. What is the channel S/ N?
5. If we know the loudness rating of a telephone subset earpiece and of the subset
mouthpiece, what additional data do we need to determine the overall loudness
rating (OLR) of a telephone connection?
6. The BER of an underlying digital circuit is 1 10 8 , for data riding on this circuit.
What is the best BER we can expect on the data?
7. What are the three basic impairments on a telecommunication transmission chan-
nel?