Abstract: A personal communications system enables the operator to simultaneously transmit voice and data communication to a remote site. The personal communications system is equipped with two telephone line interfaces to allow connection between two remote sites. The connection between the first remote site and the second remote site may operate in an analog voice mode, a digital data communications mode, and a voice over data communications mode. A switch between analog voice mode and digital data communications mode and analog voice mode and voice over data communications mode is performed using switching tones, including calling tones, answer tones, and DTMF tones. Hardware and software switches are also used to program the modems in the personal communication systems for originating and answering modes.

Abstract: A personal communications system enables the operator to simultaneously transmit voice and data communication to a remote site. The personal communications system is equipped with two telephone line interfaces to allow connection over a communications link between two remote sites. The personal communications system incorporates advanced priority statistical multiplexing of non-time-critical data with time-critical data over the communications link to increase channel throughput without a reduction in quality of the time-critical data. The personal communications system may be networked in different topological configurations to enable conferencing in a variety of time-critical and non-time-critical communications.

Abstract: The voice over data component of a personal communications system enables the operator to simultaneously transmit voice and data communication to a remote site. This voice over data function directly encodes digitized voice samples onto the carrier using quadrature amplitude modulation to transmit multiple bits of the voice sample for every baud. The system also allocates selected bauds of the carrier to voice and to data so the voice over data may be transmitted using the same allocated bandwidth. The system may also dynamically reallocate the bandwidth over the telephone line depending on the demands of the voice grade digitized signal.

Abstract: The present invention includes software and hardware components to enable digital data communication over standard telephone lines. The present invention converts analog voice signals to digital data, compresses that data and places the compressed speech data into packets for transfer over the telephone lines to a remote site. A voice control digital signal processor (DSP) operates to use one of a plurality of speech compression algorithms which produce a scaleable amount of compression. The rate of compression is inversely proportional to the quality of the speech the compression algorithm is able to reproduce. The higher the compression, the lower the reproduction quality. The selection of the rate of compression is dependant on such factors as the speed or data bandwidth on the communications connection between the two sites, the data demand between the sites and amount of silence detected in the speech signal. The voice compression rate is dynamically changed as the aforementioned factors change.