Mobile telephone | Definition & History (2024)

Cellular communication

All cellular telephone systems exhibit several fundamental characteristics, as summarized in the following:

1. The geographic area served by a cellular system is broken up into smaller geographic areas, or cells. Uniform hexagons most frequently are employed to represent these cells on maps and diagrams; in practice, though, radio waves do not confine themselves to hexagonal areas, so the actual cells have irregular shapes.

2. All communication with a mobile or portable instrument within a given cell is made to a base station that serves the cell.

3. Because of the low transmitting power of battery-operated portable instruments, specific sending and receiving frequencies assigned to a cell may be reused in other cells within the larger geographic area. Thus, the spectral efficiency of a cellular system (that is, the uses to which it can put its portion of the radio spectrum) is increased by a factor equal to the number of times a frequency may be reused within its service area.

4. As a mobile instrument proceeds from one cell to another during the course of a call, a central controller automatically reroutes the call from the old cell to the new cell without a noticeable interruption in the signal reception. This process is known as handoff. The central controller, or mobile telephone switching office (MTSO), thus acts as an intelligent central office switch that keeps track of the movement of the mobile subscriber.

5. As demand for the radio channels within a given cell increases beyond the capacity of that cell (as measured by the number of calls that may be supported simultaneously), the overloaded cell is “split” into smaller cells, each with its own base station and central controller. The radio-frequency allocations of the original cellular system are then rearranged to account for the greater number of smaller cells.

Frequency reuse between discontiguous cells and the splitting of cells as demand increases are the concepts that distinguish cellular systems from other wireless telephone systems. They allow cellular providers to serve large metropolitan areas that may contain hundreds of thousands of customers.

Development of cellular systems

In the United States, interconnection of mobile transmitters and receivers with the public switched telephone network (PSTN) began in 1946, with the introduction of mobile telephone service (MTS) by the (). In the U.S. MTS system, a user who wished to place a call from a mobile phone had to search manually for an unused channel before placing the call. The user then spoke with a mobile operator, who actually dialed the call over the PSTN. The radio connection was simplex—i.e., only one party could speak at a time, the call direction being controlled by a push-to-talk switch in the mobile handset. In 1964 AT&T introduced the improved mobile telephone service (IMTS). This provided full duplex operation, automatic dialing, and automatic channel searching. Initially 11 channels were provided, but in 1969 an additional 12 channels were made available. Since only 11 (or 12) channels were available for all users of the system within a given geographic area (such as the metropolitan area around a large city), the IMTS system faced a high demand for a very limited channel resource. Moreover, each base-station antenna had to be located on a tall structure and had to transmit at high power in order to provide coverage throughout the entire service area. Because of these high power requirements, all subscriber units in the IMTS system were motor-vehicle-based instruments that carried large storage batteries.

During this time a truly cellular system, known as the advanced mobile phone system, or AMPS, was developed primarily by AT&T and Motorola, Inc. AMPS was based on 666 paired voice channels, spaced every 30 kilohertz in the 800-megahertz region. The system employed an analog modulation approach—frequency modulation, or FM—and was designed from the outset to support subscriber units for use both in automobiles and by pedestrians. It was publicly introduced in Chicago in 1983 and was a success from the beginning. At the end of the first year of service, there were a total of 200,000 AMPS subscribers throughout the United States; five years later there were more than 2,000,000. In response to expected service shortages, the American cellular industry proposed several methods for increasing capacity without requiring additional spectrum allocations. One analog FM approach, proposed by Motorola in 1991, was known as narrowband AMPS, or NAMPS. In NAMPS systems each existing 30-kilohertz voice channel was split into three 10-kilohertz channels. Thus, in place of the 832 channels available in AMPS systems, the NAMPS system offered 2,496 channels. A second approach, developed by a committee of the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) in 1988, employed digital modulation and digital voice compression in conjunction with a time-division multiple access (TDMA) method; this also permitted three new voice channels in place of one AMPS channel. Finally, in 1994 there surfaced a third approach, developed originally by Qualcomm, Inc., but also adopted as a standard by the TIA. This third approach used a form of spread spectrum multiple access known as code-division multiple access (CDMA)—a technique that, like the original TIA approach, combined digital voice compression with digital modulation. (For more information on the techniques of information compression, signal modulation, and multiple access, see telecommunications.) The CDMA system offered 10 to 20 times the capacity of existing AMPS cellular techniques. All of these improved-capacity cellular systems were eventually deployed in the United States, but, since they were incompatible with one another, they supported rather than replaced the older AMPS standard.

Although AMPS was the first cellular system to be developed, a Japanese system was the first cellular system to be deployed, in 1979. Other systems that preceded AMPS in operation include the Nordic mobile telephone (NMT) system, deployed in 1981 in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, and the total access communication system (TACS), deployed in the United Kingdom in 1983. A number of other cellular systems were developed and deployed in many more countries in the following years. All of them were incompatible with one another. In 1988 a group of government-owned public telephone bodies within the European Community announced the digital global system for mobile communications, referred to as GSM, the first such system that would permit any cellular user in one European country to operate in another European country with the same equipment. GSM soon became ubiquitous throughout Europe.

The analog cellular systems of the 1980s are now referred to as “first-generation” (or 1G) systems, and the digital systems that began to appear in the late 1980s and early ’90s are known as the “second generation” (2G). Since the introduction of 2G cell phones, various enhancements have been made in order to provide data services and applications such as Internet browsing, two-way text messaging, still-image transmission, and mobile access by personal computers. One of the most successful applications of this kind is iMode, launched in 1999 in Japan by NTT DoCoMo, the mobile service division of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation. Supporting Internet access to selected Web sites, interactive games, information retrieval, and text messaging, iMode became extremely successful; within three years of its introduction, more than 35 million users in Japan had iMode-enabled cell phones.

Beginning in 1985, a study group of the Geneva-based International Telecommunication Union (ITU) began to consider specifications for Future Public Land Mobile Telephone Systems (FPLMTS). These specifications eventually became the basis for a set of “third-generation” (3G) cellular standards, known collectively as IMT-2000. The 3G standards are based loosely on several attributes: the use of CDMA technology; the ability eventually to support three classes of users (vehicle-based, pedestrian, and fixed); and the ability to support voice, data, and multimedia services. The world’s first 3G service began in Japan in October 2001 with a system offered by NTT DoCoMo. Soon 3G service was being offered by a number of different carriers in Japan, South Korea, the United States, and other countries. Several new types of service compatible with the higher data rates of 3G systems have become commercially available, including full-motion video transmission, image transmission, location-aware services (through the use of global positioning system [GPS] technology), and high-rate data transmission.

The increasing demands placed on mobile telephones to handle even more data than 3G could led to the development of 4G technology. In 2008 the ITU set forward a list of requirements for what it called IMT-Advanced, or 4G; these requirements included data rates of 1 gigabit per second for a stationary user and 100 megabits per second for a moving user. The ITU in 2010 decided that two technologies, LTE-Advanced (Long Term Evolution; LTE) and WirelessMan-Advanced (also called WiMAX), met the requirements. The Swedish telephone company TeliaSonera introduced the first 4G LTE network in Stockholm in 2009.

Airborne cellular systems

In addition to the terrestrial cellular phone systems described above, there also exist several systems that permit the placement of telephone calls to the PSTN by passengers on commercial aircraft. These in-flight telephones, known by the generic name aeronautical public correspondence (APC) systems, are of two types: terrestrial-based, in which telephone calls are placed directly from an aircraft to an en route ground station; and satellite-based, in which telephone calls are relayed via satellite to a ground station. In the United States the North American terrestrial system (NATS) was introduced by GTE Corporation in 1984. Within a decade the system was installed in more than 1,700 aircraft, with ground stations in the United States providing coverage over most of the United States and southern Canada. A second-generation system, GTE Airfone GenStar, employed digital modulation. In Europe the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) adopted a terrestrial APC system known as the terrestrial flight telephone system (TFTS) in 1992. This system employs digital modulation methods and operates in the 1,670–1,675- and 1,800–1,805-megahertz bands. In order to cover most of Europe, the ground stations must be spaced every 50 to 700 km (30 to 435 miles).