## Commercial realities

#### The reality of the communications market-place is that cost and appearance mean much more to the consumer than the technology inside. Mobile phones sell on their style and talk time, rather than their receiver sensitivity or bit error rate performance. #### This is an important lesson for engineers to grasp, for although some mobile phones are indeed much better technically than others, all are simply assumed by the customer to work properly, and achieving technical excellence may not lead to excellent sales. It is a difficult and challenging task to design a product that meets the expectations and needs without over-engineering or under-engineering and all the cost, timescale and reliability issues that follow. It is hoped that this book will provide a good grasp of the design choices available to the digital communications engineer, from which a correctly engineered product can be achieved. |