<span>It is generally considered that remote and rural telephone users generate less traffic as compared<span> to urban area users. This lowers the attraction of investment in rural areas by the<span> telecommunications companies and service providers. The financial implications of wiring a<span> vast area for low telephone traffic causes most telephone service providers to ignore those<span> regions. Still, it is known that telecommunications are essential to the economic development of<span> a region and that traffic increases rapidly as soon as the service is available. A satellite–based<span> telephone network can provide efficient long distance telephone service to remote rural<span> communities at a lower cost than land-based wired networks in most cases. Mobile satellite<span> systems already provide this service, but are limited in capacity and charge high per-minute fees<span> for the satellite link. Small earth stations and GEO satellites can provide this service more<span> efficiently and at lower cost. On top of that, bandwidth efficient multiplexing with compressed<span> speech, Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and Packet discarding methods can even further reduce <span>the cost of service for the users in rural areas. In this paper, Statistical Time Division Multiplexer<span> (STDM) architecture was simulated. Two packet discarding methods, random packet discarding<span> and cyclic packet discarding are used to maximize bandwidth utilization along with VAD.<span> Results indicate that considering monologue speech source, with 80%, activity for each 6.4 kbps<span> sources, on a channel of 64 kbps, 12 users can be allowed to be multiplexed instead of 9,<span> therefore a Digital Speech Interpolation (DSI) advantage of 1.33 is achieved with 3% packet<span> loss. Furthermore, it is observed that cyclic packet discarding technique perform better than<span> random packet discarding in terms of subjective quality<br /><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br /><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>
