On the eve of its move to TI Group Plc, Dowty Communications Ltd was talking about the guts of its SPX fast packet switch, which is unusual in that it carries speech, but one problem with packetised speech is that the gaps in conversation become very noticeable since there is no crackle of the line or ambient noise – no packets are sent during silent patches you see; Dowty’s solution to this psychologically unsettling quiet? To analyse the level of line noise and inject an artificial hiss whenever it goes quiet – shucks, and there we were thinking that silence was golden…
