The impact of four generations of mobile phone technology
1 min read
It's hard to believe the first mobile phone call was made 40 years ago; the technology continues to feel as though it's a recent development. Yet, four decades ago, an engineer made that call using a prototype version of the Motorola DynaTAC. If you believe Wikipedia, the call reached the wrong number. Neverthless, it connected and the rest, as they say, is history. But what a history.
Getting to that first mobile phone call had taken many years. Although car phones were in use in the US and the UK, these large and heavy systems remained tethered to the car.
Bell had already launched a commercial system using cellular principles in 1969. The service, which was available on trains running between Washington and New York, used trackside hardware to switch calls and demonstrated some of the principles involved in handing calls over and frequency management.
It took another 10 years before the problem of handing over mobile phone calls was solved satisfactorily – systems engineers finally realised the mobile phone world was 3d. While handing calls over between cells worked well enough if you were on the street, it wasn't so good if you were up a New York skyscraper.
As users moved around, their phones linked with different cells – but not the ones which the network expected. If a call linked to an unexpected cell, it dropped out. That brought finer granularity to the cellular network, but it also created backhaul problems.
When the first commercial call was made in Chicago in 1983, early adopters needed deep pockets – the production version of the DynaTAC carried a price tag of $3995.
In three decades, the mobile phone has gone from a novelty to an essential tool: those who weren't born when the mobile phone reached the UK in 1985 probably cannot imagine life without one. It would take a very brave person to predict what the mobile phone will be capable of in another 30 years.
