The advantages of a short frame structure cannot be overstated. Varma et al. have shown that frame erasure lengths have an impact on the recovery time of speech quality in the presence of radio link errors. Longer system frame lengths lead to longer speech frame erasures, which in turn lead to slower recovery of speech quality for the International Consultative Committee for Telephone and Telegraph (CCITT) standard adaptive differential pulse code modulation (ADPCM) decoders. For example, for 2.5 ms erasures, the decoded speech signal recovers to within 3 dB of the error-free signal (in terms of signal energy) within 5 ms after restoring correct transmission for 80 percent of burst errors. For 10 ms erasures, the 80th percentile delay for recovery to within 3 dB of error- free speech is 35 ms. Therefore, systems with shorter frame lengths can provide more robust speech quality in the presence of link errors.

Because of the relatively large alerting channel bandwidth in the SBC, PACS has the ability to support up to 200,000 users per alerting/registration area (ARA) with approximately zero probability of alert blocking. PACS supports an effective polling procedure which can be implemented as required by a service provider. This feature allows the service provider to use an implicit deregistration process in the network to reduce network signaling between home location registers (HLRs) and visited location registers (VLRs). This feature is effective and nondisruptive because the alert blocking for call delivery is virtually nonexistent and also because the access collision probability, even during the busy hour and with highly mobile users (i.e., at highway speeds) is less than 1 x 10­8. ARAs can be made arbitrarily large, which considerably reduces registration traffic when compared to other low-tier radio technologies.