-
1917: First "Mobile" Phone
More like a radio, but at least it could be set into a car and moved by those means instead -
Military Telephones
Telephones really started being used by the military throughout WW2, as you could take it with you and transmit from the field. These were radios -
Period: to
Cellular Concepts
In December of 1947, Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young, Bell Labs engineers, Proposed hexagonal cells for mobile devices in vehicles. At the time, they could not implement this due to limited capabilities, nor had they found the frequencies required to complete such a thing it would be 2 decades until Richard H. Frenkiel, Joel S. Engel and Philip T. Porter of Bell Labs would expand on the idea, into a more detailed plan. we now have the towers we do today. -
MTS and AT&T
AT&T started there own impact on the history of telecommunication in 1949, creating MTS or mobile telephone service to one hundred highways and towns by 1948. The service was a rarity and only had about 5000 users placing 30 000 calls a week. Calls had to be set manually by operators. The call subscriber equipment weighed about 80lbs -
IMTS
AT&T again introduced another vast improvment to telecommunication technology, giving the service the name improved mobile telephone service, IMTS used additional radio channels, allowing more simultaneous calls in a geographic area, as well as improved customer dialing. Despite improved capabilities, demand outstripped capacity. Agreeing with state regulatory agencies, AT&T had to limit the service to just 40 000 customers system wide. In New York city, 2000 customers shared just 12 Channels -
Radio Common Carrier
Radio common carrier or RCC was first introduced in the 1960's by small independent companies who distributed them to compete against AT&T's IMTS. RCC systems were provided until the 1980's until cellular AMPS systems made it obsolete. -
Handheld Mobile phone
Prior to 1973 there had been no way to have a smaller, hand-held long range device someone could take with them, until motorola engineer Martin Cooper who was a Motorola researcher at the time made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subsriber equipment, placing a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs. The prototype handheld used by Dr. Cooper weighed 1.1kg and was 23 centimetres long. The prototype offered a talk time of 30 minutes and took 10 hours for one full recharge -
First generation analouge cellular
The first automatic cellular systems were NTT's first system used in Tokya later speading to the whole of Japan, And NMT in Nordic countries in 1981. The first analouge cellular system widely deployed in america was AMPS or Advanced Mobile Phone System. It was commercially introduced into the Americas in 1983 -
Second generation Cellular
In the 1990's, the first cellular mobile phones were deployed. Two systems competed for global supremacy: the European developed GSM standard and the U.S. developed CDMA standard. These were much different from the previous generation of devices by using digital instead of analouge transmission, and also fast out-of-band phone-to-network signaling. The rise in mobile phone usage as a result of 2G was explosive and this era also saw the advent of prepaid mobile phones. -
Third generation: Mobile Broadband
The rise of the Third generation came due to a demand of 2G phones. It became clear that because people were making these devices part of their daily lives, they needed to expand on these ideas. Further, experience from fixed broadband services showed there would also be an ever increasing demand for greater data speeds. so the industry began to work on the next generation of technology known as 3G, the main difference being the use of packet switching rather than circuit switching. -
4G-Native IP networks
By 2009, it had become clear that, at some point, 3G networks would be overwhelmed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming media, so the industry began to optimize data as sort of a 4th generation technology with the promise of speed improvements up to 10-fold over existing 3G technologies. -
Satellite Mobile Networks
As well as the now-common cellular phone, there is also the very different approach of connecting directly from the handset to an Earth-orbiting satellite. Such mobile phones can be used in remote areas out of reach of wired networks or where construction of a cellular network is uneconomic.
