History Of Phones
Mobile phones have changed the way we live our lives and to many, the prospect of a world without voice calling, text messaging and mobile Internet access is an unsettling one. As we all know, mobile phones didn’t just happen overnight. They grew up, just like us.
Mobile phones evolved over five different generations, the latest of which is still being rolled out and adopted by consumers. Don’t worry – by the time most of us will have switched to 4G there will undoubtedly be yet another standard to aspire to.
Today we’ll be dialing into the past and briefly examining the history of mobile phones.
Pre-Standardisation, or “0G”
AT&T were one of the first to commercialize mobile telecommunication in 1947. The service known simply as “Mobile Telephone Service” (MTS) spread to more than a hundred towns and highway paths by the end of the year. The service relied on an operator to connect both incoming and outgoing calls.
The telephones used were not particularly portable and used a half-duplex “press to speak” system where the caller would have to release the button to hear the other person. That very same year two Bell Labs engineers proposed the foundations for the modern cellular network. At the time the plans were daring, and it took until the 1960s for the plans to be implemented and even longer to come to market.
MTS was used in North America until the 1980s, despite AT&T’s introduction of the aptly-named Improves Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS) in 1965. The new service introduced user dialing, removed the need for operator forwarding and used additional radio channels which increased the number of possible subscribers and calls, as well as area coverage. IMTS was still mobile telephony in its infancy however, and was limited to 40,000 subscribers nationwide. In New York city, 2,000 customers shared 12 radio channels which on average took 30 minutes to place a call.
Mobile phones evolved over five different generations, the latest of which is still being rolled out and adopted by consumers. Don’t worry – by the time most of us will have switched to 4G there will undoubtedly be yet another standard to aspire to.
Today we’ll be dialing into the past and briefly examining the history of mobile phones.
Pre-Standardisation, or “0G”
AT&T were one of the first to commercialize mobile telecommunication in 1947. The service known simply as “Mobile Telephone Service” (MTS) spread to more than a hundred towns and highway paths by the end of the year. The service relied on an operator to connect both incoming and outgoing calls.
The telephones used were not particularly portable and used a half-duplex “press to speak” system where the caller would have to release the button to hear the other person. That very same year two Bell Labs engineers proposed the foundations for the modern cellular network. At the time the plans were daring, and it took until the 1960s for the plans to be implemented and even longer to come to market.
MTS was used in North America until the 1980s, despite AT&T’s introduction of the aptly-named Improves Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS) in 1965. The new service introduced user dialing, removed the need for operator forwarding and used additional radio channels which increased the number of possible subscribers and calls, as well as area coverage. IMTS was still mobile telephony in its infancy however, and was limited to 40,000 subscribers nationwide. In New York city, 2,000 customers shared 12 radio channels which on average took 30 minutes to place a call.
No comments:
Post a Comment