How Cell Phones Started

Tuesday February 21, 2006 in: Toys For The Boys Tag(s):

cell phones At the way cell phone technology is being developing nowadays it won't be surprising if we find this ubiquitous handheld instrument of the millennium to be everything a Swiss knife aspires to be but failed to do so.

In fact it may even replace the Swiss knife if cell phone giants like Nokia or Samsung had anything to say about it. And more people are going into the cell phone distributor business due to the burgeoning market.

But this is getting ahead of the story. For now this let's take a short cruise on the history of cell phone technology:

Long confined to the home or office, mobile phone technology traced its roots to so-called mobile rigs which along with taxi cab and police radios facilitated two-way communication outside the home and office.

As most reference material would state modern cell phone technology took off when Motorola employee Dr. Martin Cooper called up rival to Joel Engel, head of research of AT and T's Bell Labs while walking the streets of New York City.

cell phone 1 While Dr. Cooper one-upped Engel with the use of a Motorola DynaTac unit---owing to Motorola's specialty in developing automotive radio in police cars and taxis---it was Bell which launched the first commercial cell phone network in the world.

These first generation (1st G) units which had colorful initials like NMT, AMPS, TACS as well as the normal sounding Radiocom 2000 were eventually replaced by their second generation counterparts which had automatic roaming between countries.

In 1990 the first digital cellular phone call was made in the US and the following year the first GSM network opened in Europe.

The second generation units (2G) were characterised by digital circuit switched transmission and more advanced and fast phone to network signalling.

More information on this subject next time.