Cell phones, from GSM unlocked cell phones to CDMA, how could we have lived without them?
Well, the concept for cell phones has been around for a lot longer than the technologies to offer them was. As soon as the initial landlines came into use, individuals had the concept of improving the convenience and flexibility of this new communication medium, and of bringing it to new areas, for example cars.
At 1st, cell phones hadn’t been much more than your basic two way portable radios, but as technologies improved, the concepts behind cell phones improved rapidly.
Bell labs and Motorola have been both involved in a dramatic race to see who could invent the 1st viable cell phones. While Bell labs had installed innovative radio systems into police cars, these devices had been far too big for anyone to carry and had been thus impractical as a truly mobile telephone.
Even so, in 1973, Martin Cooper, a scientist working for Motorola successfully made the very first cell phone call utilizing a portable handset. The age of the cell phone was at last born, and who did he call? None other than his rival at Bell Labs, Joel Engel, who had been racing with him to produce the invention.
Within a couple of years, both Bell and AT&T had come up with prototypes of their own and the very first trial areas had been set up. Chicago and Tokyo had been the primary cities in the world where you could use a cell phone but their availability was extremely limited and the new phones have been only available to a select number of trial customers to begin with. For example, the 1979 trial venture in Chicago distributed cell phones to just 2000 customers.
The concept caught on like wildfire. By 1987 there had been over one million cell phone users in the US alone. It seemed as if everyone wanted a cell phone and the major companies involved had really hit a home run. On the other hand, there had been difficulties. For example, in the US, the FCC regulates and allocates radio bandwidth for different purposes. The radio spectrum is limited and can become ‘full’, so it is necessary to control who gets use of different parts of it. The area they licensed for cell phones, at 800 MHz was quickly crowded. On the other hand, instead of giving far more, they forced the cell phone companies to improve technologies and come up with a lot more efficient ways of utilizing the bandwidth they had. By the end of the 80′s this had been achieved and the cell phone age we know at present really got underway. Today we have a variety of cell phones and even unlocked cell phones to choose from, with multiple carriers and bands.
So as the saying goes, “The rest is history”.