QUALITY-BASED HANDOVER

The present invention relates to the technique of handover in mobile telephony. A new Transcoder and Rate Adaptation Unit (100 FIG. 3) is introduced which provides two uplink (230, 250 respectively, FIG. 3) and two downlink (240, 260 respectively, FIG. 3) channels. The use of these two channels (230, 250 respectively, FIG. 3) on the uplink during handover provides for the use of distributed handover on the uplink. The result minimizes the audible interruption during handover by minimizing the loss of Traffic Channel frames to what is possible within the GSM standard. Additionally, interruption of the speech or background noise during these lost frames is masked by an error concealment algorithm, since the Transcoder and Rate Adaptation Unit (100 FIG. 3) still has information from the Base Transceiver Station responsible for transmission before the handover.