If you’re not reading this on your mobile phone, stop right now and switch. Today is the anniversary of the first cellular service in the US being switched on. It was available only in Chicago, and the first service provider was Ameritech Mobile Communications.
There were only a couple of kinds of phones available, and only from Ameritech itself. They weren’t quite as mobile as they are now, either; most of them had to be installed and used in your car. The ones you could carry around with you weighed at least two pounds. The “car phones” and “bag phones,” though, still have an advantage over handheld devices — because the antenna is never located right next to your head, they’re able to transmit with a 3-watt signal instead of the .6 watt limit required for handhelds. That means you could get a signal a lot farther from the nearest cell tower.
Cellular networks came to the US a bit later than in other parts of the world. The first device that really qualified as a “mobile phone” was patented in Finland in…you might not believe this…1917 by Eric Tigerstedt. It was never mass produced, though, because there wasn’t a good way to provide a network of radio towers that could receive the weak signals from a puny battery-powered transmitter. In the US, AT&T circulated internal memos about the possibility of creating a mobile, radio-based telephone system as early as 1915, but never went ahead with it because their business depended on the wired telephone.
The radio networking issues began to be solved just after WWII when Bell Labs proposed a system of overlapping “cells” where every call could be identified and tracked as the caller moved between cells, so the connection was maintained. It was launched in Sweden in 1956, but couldn’t support a large number of calls all at once.
Bell Labs kept working on the idea, but then they hired a consultant. The Very Expensive Report they received explained that the whole market, worldwide, for “mobile phones” would never be more than 200,000 units. Not a particularly big market. So the world’s biggest (at the time) telephone company dropped the whole idea.
Meanwhile, mobile phone service was launched in Japan in 1979, and the Nordic Mobile Telephone service opened in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in 1981 — since it operated in four countries, NMT introduced international roaming.
Cellular signals were analog, not digital, until the second generation of cell networks arrived in the early 1990s. There were three different networking systems: GSM, CDMA, FDMA, and TDMA. They were mutually incompatible, so if your provider used TDMA, switching to a different carrier that used CDMA meant getting a whole new phone.
That was a problem in the US, where all three duplicate cellular networks were built out. But in most of the rest of the world, one cellular standard was agreed upon by all the service providers and shared throughout a whole country, and you could choose any phone because there were all compatible. That led to improved service and lower pricing in those places, since each provider didn’t have to fund their own network.
Cellular network standards are generally labeled based (loosely) on their “generation;” the very first were the “zeroth generation,” and the first commercial network, in Japan, was 1G. Then the first digital network, in 1991 in Finland, was 2G. After that things started to get confusing, thanks to marketing getting involved (the job of marketing is to confuse you enough to buy what they want you to buy). A refinement called General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) became 2.5G, then there was 2.75G for “Edge” — which, believe it or not, was the tortured acronym for Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution. The “rates” there means speed, not fees, although in real life it kind of worked out to be the same thing.
The acronyms got worse after that. What most people called 3G was UMTS, the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, which was not at all universal, but did incorporate HSPA and HSPA+ (just never mind; I’m not spelling out any more of this nonsense). Then there’s also CDMA2000, thanks to the standard published by the trade group called 3GPP — which, of course, published a standard also called 3GPP, as well as another one called 3GPP2.
But you can’t forget about 4G, which is supposedly an improvement over 3G because it provides the features specified by the “ITU” in the “IMT Advanced” document that explains that 4G phones support 3D television. No, really; it says that. 4G is also called “LTE”, which is a highly technical acronym that doesn’t mean anything except Long Term Evolution, which is straight out of the marketing department. I know, I wasn’t going to spell any more of these out, but it’s just too absurd to resist.
And that brings us to 5G, which differs just enough from 4G to require everyone to buy a new phone (please contain your astonishment). 5G networks operate at a higher radio frequency so there’s more bandwidth. On the other hand, over a century of experience in radio communication has shown decisively that higher frequencies can’t go as far and are more easily blocked by things like walls. Or for that matter, rain and fog.
So when you can finally buy a 5G device, you can count on keeping it for a long time! Except…6G is already in the works. It will be much better, obviously, and even higher frequency, so those cat videos will download even more quickly. But throughout it all, you can at least keep your phone number. That’s what David Contorno has done, after all. He bought an Ameritech AC140 phone back in 1985, when Ameritech was the only provider around. That phone hasn’t worked in decades, but Contorno still has the same phone number. It’s the longest-lasting mobile phone number in the world. The Guinness Book of World Records says so.
