Advantages & Limitations of Tandem Free Operation (TFO)

§Improvement in speech quality by avoiding the doubletranscodingin the network;

§Possible savings on the inter-PLMN transmission links, which are carrying compressed speech compatible with a 32kbit/s or 16kbit/s or 8kbit/s sub-multiplexing scheme, including packet switched transmission;

§Possible savings in processing power in the network equipment since thetranscodingfunctions in theTranscoderUnits are bypassed;

§Possible reduction in the end-to-end transmission delay.

§Same speech codec in each handset

§Digital transparency in core network (EC off!)

§TFO disabled upon cell handover, call transfer,inbandDTMF, announcements or conferencing

§No resource optimization astranscodersfunctions are always present in the path.