Talk:Air interface

19:04, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
I've deleted the sentence added by 4.167.233.164. It has since been copy edited (thanks all), but it was, to my understanding, fundamentally misleading and incorrect, as it discussed "sound waves". Clearly RF communications are transmitted in radio waves and not sound waves.

I wonder if the word "circuit" should be changed, since there's no circuit (wires), and because perhaps this inappropriately restricts the term to one side of the circuit switched/packet switched divide.

I have some background in wireless networking (though not cellular networks), and I don't think I ever used the term "Air interface", at least in a formal way. This doesn't feel like well defined vocabulary. Will someone define "air interface" more carefully with respect to the OSI model or wireless protocol stacks? Is this term well defined and widely used? Comments? Ideas?

Cheers, Asmendel 19:04, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Air interface vs RAN
How are these synonyms? And where does the notion that "Air interface" isn't used in GSM come from? Just grabbing the nearest book on GSM to me (Heine's GSM Networks: Protocols, Terminology, and Implementation, there's an entire chapter called "The Air-Interface of GSM".

An air interface merely describes the radio part of the protocols used for the phone to communicate with the tower or towers. The RAN is a larger network which handles many aspects of the routing of data/channels and is a significantly higher level concept.

Both RAN and Air interface make this claim that they're describing the same thing whereas I see little relationship. I'd like to see a cite for this. Squiggleslash 03:26, 5 January 2007 (UTC)