History of - Mobile Phone

What is mobile phone?
A mobile phone (also known as a cellular phone, cell phone and a hand phone) is a device that can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile phone operator, allowing access to the public telephone network. By contrast, a cordless telephone is used only within the short range of a single, private base station.

In addition to telephony, modern mobile phones also support a wide variety of other services such as text messaging, MMS, email, Internet access, short-range wireless communications (infrared, Bluetooth), business applications, gaming and photography. Mobile phones that offer these and more general computing capabilities are referred to as smartphones.

History of Mobile Phone

In history, the first hand-held mobile phone was demonstrated by Dr Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing around 1 kg.[1] In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first to be commercially available. In the twenty years from 1990 to 2010, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew from 12.4 million to over 4.6 billion, penetrating the developing economies and reaching the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Radiophones have a long and varied history going back to Reginald Fessenden's invention and shore-to-ship demonstration of radio telephony, through the Second World War with military use of radio telephony links and civil services in the 1950s.

The First Mobile Telephone
The first mobile telephone call made from a car occurred in St. Louis, Missouri, USA on June 17, 1946, using the Bell System's Mobile Telephone Service. The equipment weighed 80 pounds (36 kg), and the AT&T service, basically a massive party line, cost US$30 per month (equal to $337.33 today) plus 30–40 cents per local call, equal to $3.37 to $4.50 today.

In 1956, the world’s first partly automatic car phone system, Mobile System A (MTA), was launched in Sweden. MTA phones were composed of vacuum tubes and relays, and had a weight of 40 kg. In 1962, a more modern version called Mobile System B (MTB) was launched, which was a push-button telephone, and which used transistors to enhance the telephone’s calling capacity and improve its operational reliability, thereby reducing the weight of the apparatus to 10 kg. In 1971, the MTD version was launched, opening for several different brands of equipment and gaining commercial success.

The First Practical Mobile Phone
Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive is considered to be the inventor of the first practical mobile phone for handheld use in a non-vehicle setting, after a long race against Bell Labs for the first portable mobile phone. Using a modern, if somewhat heavy portable handset, Cooper made the first call on a handheld mobile phone on April 3, 1973 to his rival, Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.

The First Automated Cellular Network
The world's first commercial automated cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979, initially in the metropolitan area of Tokyo. Within five years, the NTT network had been expanded to cover the whole population of Japan and became the first nationwide 1G network. In 1981, this was followed by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.[10] NMT was the first mobile phone network featuring international roaming. The first 1G network launched in the USA was Chicago-based Ameritech in 1983 using the Motorola DynaTAC mobile phone. Several countries then followed in the early-to-mid 1980s including the UK, Mexico and Canada.

2G Cellular Technology
In 1991, the second generation (2G) cellular technology was launched in Finland by Radiolinja on the GSM standard, which sparked competition in the sector as the new operators challenged the incumbent 1G network operators.

3G Cellular Technology
Ten years later, in 2001, the third generation (3G) was launched in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard.This was followed by 3.5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G enhancements based on the high-speed packet access (HSPA) family, allowing UMTS networks to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.

4G Systems
The recently released 4th generation, also known as Beyond 3G, aims to provide broadband wireless access with nominal data rates of 100 Mbit/s to fast moving devices, and 1 Gbit/s to stationary devices defined by the ITU-R

4G systems may be based on the 3GPP LTE (Long Term Evolution) cellular standard, offering peak bit rates of 326.4 Mbit/s. It may perhaps also be based on WiMax or Flash-OFDM wireless metropolitan area network technologies that promise broadband wireless access with speeds that reaches 233 Mbit/s for mobile users. The radio interface in these systems is based on all-IP packet switching, MIMO diversity, multi-carrier modulation schemes, Dynamic Channel Assignment (DCA) and channel-dependent scheduling. A 4G system should be a complete replacement for current network infrastructure and is expected to be able to provide a comprehensive and secure IP solution where voice, data, and streamed multimedia can be given to users on a "Anytime, Anywhere" basis, and at much higher data rates than previous generations.

In March 2011, KT from South Korea announced that they has expanded its high-speed wireless broadband network by 4G WiBro cover 85 percent of the population. It is the largest broadband network covered in the world, followed by Japan and US with 70 percent and 36 percent respectively.

In early 2011, 4G mobile phones were released by Motorola, HTC and Samsung.

Source: Wikipedia. See more here.