The history of mobile phones is the developement of devices connected wirelessly tot he public switched telephone network.The pure transmission of speech by radio goes back to the Second World War with military use of radio telephony links from shore-to-ship.
Mobile telephones built into automobiles became available in the 1940s. Back then, the devices where bulky and consumed high power. Networks also could only handle a handful of conversations at the same time. Nowadays, modern cellular networks allow the use of mobile phones for voices and data communications simultaneous and can handle a large number of connections at the same time.
Early mobile phones services
In 1946, the Mobile Telephones Service was introduced, which only had three available radio channels and call set-up had to be done manual by a mobile operator. While MTS was commercially very successful, the service was very limited.
In 1964, IMTS (Improved Mobile Telephones Service) was introduced with more available channels and automatic handling of calls to the public telephone network. At the same time the Radio Common Carrier (RCC) was introduced and was operated until the 1980s.
Back then, Roaming was not possible as of a lack of technical standards. That meant that a phone from Nebraska would not work somewhere else.
There where also two-way mobile radios used in taxicabs, police cruisers and ambulances, but where not mobile phones as they where not connected to the public telephone network.
First generation: Cellular networks (1G)
In 1978, the first First Generation network was turned on in Chicago. This new network allowed to transfer calls between two cells during a conversation.
One year later in 1979, NTT launched also a 1G cellular network in Japan, first only covering the metropolitan area of Tokyo with over 20 million inhabitants and 23 base stations. Within the next 5 years, NTT would build a network which would cover the whole population of Japan making it the first nation-wide 1G network.
Several other countires including the UK, Mexico and Canada also launched 1G cellular networks in the early 1980s.
First generation networks also where able to reduce transmission power to allow range and cell sizes to vary.
Second generation: Digital networks (2G, 2.5G and 2.75G)
In the 1990’s, the second generation mobile phones system was introduced which mainly used the GSM standard. The biggest difference to the 1G networks where the use of digital instead of analog transmission. In 1991 the first 2G GSM network was launched in Finland.
The technological improvements such as advanced batteries and more energy-efficient electronics made it possible to move away from the huge “brick” phones and build tiny 100 to 200g hand-held devices.
The second generation digital networks also introduced a new way to communicate: The Short Message Service (SMS) which was initially only available within GSM networks but eventually spread on all digital networks.
The first machine-generated SMS was sent in 1992 in the UK, followed by the first person-to-person message sent in Finland one year later.
Another new service was introduced with 2G which was media content on mobile phones. In 1998 the first downloadable content was available in Finland which was a ringtone.
Third Generation: High speed IP data networks and mobile broadband (3G)
As the industry’s experience form fixed broadband services showed that there would be an ever increasing demand for greater data speeds, the use of 2G mobile phones became more widespread and the 2G networks could not handle these jobs, the industry began to develop the 3G standard for mobile phones. Technological, the main difference between 3G and 2G was that the third generation used packet switching rather than circuit switching for data transmission.
In May 2001 again NTT DoCoMo was the first company who launched a (pre-commercial) trial network in the Tokyo region. The first commercial 3G network was launched by NTT in October 2001 using the WCDMA technology. In 2002, the first 3G network with the rival CDMA2000 was launched by SK Telecom and KTF in South Korea, and Monet in the USA.
Also by the end of 2002 a second WCDMA network was launched in Japan by Vodafone KK (now Softbank). Also Europe launched their first third generation networks in Italy and the UK by the Three/Hutchinson group on WCDMA.
With the new third generation networks with its high connection speeds, for the first time multimedia streaming such as radio shows and even television content to 3G handsets was possible.
The high data speeds also made it possible to have fast internet access everywhere. First there where USB dongles or compact wireless router to access the 3G network with a computer or notebook.
Later on, manufacturers started including the ability to insert a SIM-card straight into the notebook.
By the beginning of 2010, E-readers such as the Amazon Kindle became available and Apple had announced the plans for embedding wireless internet on it’s iPad tablet devices.
Fourth Generation: All-IP networks (4G) of mobile phones
By 2009, it had become clear that the current 3G networks could not handle the overwhelming growth of bandwith-intensive application such as streaming media which got available to mobile phones. Therefore the industry began developing optimized fourth generation ( 4G ) standards which should improve the speed up to 10-times over existing third generation technologies. The first two available technologies considered 4G were the WiMAX (by Sprint in the USA) and the LTE standard by Scandinavian TeliaSonera.
The main improvement of 4G over 3G (technologically) was the elimination of circuit switching and employing an all-IP network.