History of mobile phones

The history of mobile phones can be traced back to devices that are unrecognisable in today's GSM dominated world.

Early years

Mobile rigs were the beginning of mobile phones, along with taxicab radios, two way radios in police cruisers, and the like. A large community of mobile radio users, known as the mobileers, popularized the technology that would eventually give way to the mobile phone. Originally, mobile phones were permanently installed in vehicles, but later versions such as the so-called "bag phones" were equipped with a cigarette lighter plug so that they could also be carried, and thus could be used as either mobile or as portable phones.

What was possibly the first real mobile phone, in the sense that it was connected to the telephone network, was tested by the Swedish police in 1946 for use in police cruisers. A half dozen calls could be made before the police car's battery ran out. Radiophones began to be publicly available in the US at the end of the 1940s^*, though the distinction between such phones and a two-way radio becomes blurry since special systems are required to "patch" into the phone network with the assistance of human operators. Recognizable mobile phones with direct dialing have existed at least since the 1950s.

For a discussion of the history of the Mobile Radio Service (MRS), and Improved Mobile Radio Service (IMRS) prior to the cellular mobile telephone AMPS in the US, see Because of the long waiting time to be issued an MRS or IMRS radio telephone in the 1960's and 1970's, "autopatch" telephone conversations became popular among amateur radio operators with the advent of FM repeaters. Because of Federal Communications Commission rules concerning the Amateur Radio Service, business conversations were prohibited from such calls.

One of the first truly successful public commercial mobile phone networks was the ARP network in Finland, launched in 1971. Posthumously, ARP is sometimes viewed as a zeroth generation (0G) cellular network, being slightly above previous proprietary and limited coverage networks.

On April 3, 1973, Motorola employee Dr. Martin Cooper placed a call to rival Joel Engel, head of research at AT&T's Bell Labs, while walking the streets of New York City talking on the first Motorola DynaTAC prototype. Motorola has a long history of making automotive radio, especially two-way radios for taxicabs and police cruisers.

In 1978 Bell Labs launched a trial of first commercial cellular network in Chicago using AMPS ^*.

First Generation Cellular

The first hand held mobile phone to become commercially available was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, which received approval in 1983. Mobile phones began to proliferate through the 1980s with the introduction of "cellular" phones based on cellular networks with multiple base stations located relatively close to each other, and protocols for the automated "handover" between two cells when a phone moved from one cell to the other. At this time analog transmission was in use in all systems. Mobile phones were somewhat larger than current ones, and at first, all were designed for permanent installation in cars (hence the term car phone). In Switzerland, the name for the big car-based phone models was "Nationales Autotelefon", and the abbreviation of it ("Natel") persists as the common designation for mobile phones. Soon, some of these bulky units were converted for use as "transportable" phones the size of a briefcase. Motorola introduced the first truly portable, hand held phone. These systems (NMT, AMPS, TACS, RTMI, C-Netz, and Radiocom 2000) later became known as first generation (1G) mobile phones.

In September 1981 the first cell phone network with automatic roaming was started in Saudi Arabia; it was an NMT system manufactured by Svenska Radio Aktiebolaget (SRA). One month later the Nordic countries started an NMT network with automatic roaming between countries.

Second Generation Cellular

In the 1990s, second generation (2G) mobile phone systems such as GSM, IS-136 ("TDMA"), iDEN and IS-95 ("CDMA") began to be introduced. The first digital cellular phone call was made in the United States in 1990, in 1991 the first GSM network opened in Europe. 2G phone systems were characterised by digital circuit switched transmission and the introduction of advanced and fast phone to network signalling. In general the frequencies used by 2G systems in Europe were higher though with some overlap, for example the 900 MHz frequency range was used for both 1G and 2G systems in Europe and so such 1G systems were rapidly closed down to make space for 2G systems. In America the IS-54 standard was deployed in the same band as AMPS and displaced some of the existing analog channels.

Coinciding with the introduction of 2G systems was a trend away from the larger "brick" phones toward tiny 100–200g hand-held devices, which soon became the norm. This change was possible through technological improvements such as more advanced batteries and more energy-efficient electronics, but also was largely related to the higher density of cellular sites caused by increasing usage levels.

Third Generation Cellular

Not long after the introduction of 2G networks, projects began to develop 3G systems. Inevitably there were many different standards with different contenders pushing their own technologies. Quite differently from 2G systems, however, the meaning of 3G has been standardized in the IMT-2000 standardization process. This process did not standardize on a technology, but rather on a set of requirements (2 Mbit/s maximum data rate indoors, 384 kbit/s outdoors, for example). At that point, the vision of a single unified worldwide standard broke down and several different standards have been introduced.

During the development of 3G systems, 2.5G systems such as CDMA2000 1x and GPRS were developed as extensions to existing 2G networks. These provide some of the features of 3G without fulfilling the promised high data rates or full range of multimedia services. For example, CDMA2000-1X delivers theoretical maximum data speeds of up to 307 kbit/s. Just beyond these is the EDGE system which in theory covers the requirements for a 3G system, but is so narrowly above these that any practical system would be sure to fall short.

At the beginning of the 21st century, 3G mobile phone systems such as UMTS and CDMA2000 1xEV-DO have now begun to be publicly available. The final success of these systems is still to be determined.

Live streaming of radio and television to 3G handsets is one future direction for the industry, with companies from RealPlayer Disney [http://www.mediaweek.co.uk/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=details&nNewsID=517507" target="_blank" >^* recently announcing services.

Patents

Mobile phone manufacturers have filed many patents over the years to protect their intellectual property rights and make as much money as possible from their products. Some examples of patents filed are:

-- Construction of a stand alone portable telephone unit
-- Process of designing user's interfaces for application programs
-- Security cellular telecommunications system
-- Hands-free telephone set

External links

The history of cellular telephones
The Route from Analog to 3G An overview of the history of the cell phone from the first analog systems to the 3G systems now available