Nowadays, there can be few areas of the inhabited world that are not hooked up to mobile networks. Mobile phones have become such a ubiquitous part of the fabric of our society that we sometimes forget that, up until relatively recently, there was no such thing as a mobile telecommunications network anywhere in the world. Nowadays, mobile telephone networks are big business, with multi-billion euro turnovers and transmitters all over the world. In the 1950s, however, there was only one mobile telephone network, and you had to go to Sweden if you wanted to use it. If you want to make a few calls when you’re on the move nowadays, you can get yourself a deal that will give you a free phone, with unlimited calls and texts, as part of an affordable monthly payment plan. Back then, you had to be pretty well heeled in order to be able to afford to make just one call on a mobile phone!

The world’s first fully automated mobile telephone system, memorably dubbed MTA (Mobile Telephone system A), was developed by Ericsson and was made available in Sweden in 1956. This was the first system that was able to operate without the need for an operator plugging things in at the transmitter base, but due to the vacuum tubes it employed in its electronics, it was very energy inefficient and weighed an absolute ton. The invention of transistors in the early sixties helped pave the way for a lighter, less power-hungry model, the MTB. The MTB network had managed to get 600 well-heeled Swedes to subscribe to it by the time of its demise in nineteen eighty three, and as such could be considered a far greater success.

A fully automated mobile phone network for civilians, named the Altay system, was set up in Moscow in 1963. By the 1970s, coverage had been expanded to incorporate over 30 cities in the USSR, and is still in use in some areas as a trunking system. A portable automated mobile phone system, going by the name of RAT, was established in Bulgaria in 1966, and could serve up to six customers per transmitter.

One of the central problems with radio phone technology in the early days was the fact that reception was lost and needed to be re-established when you went from one transmission zone to another. This problem was fixed by an researcher at Bell Labs in the US, who developed an automated ‘call handoff’ system in 1970. The following year, the American telecommunications giant AT&T submitted a proposal for a cellular mobile telephone network dubbed the Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS), to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). After years of hearings, the proposal was approved in 1982, and the AMPS network was allocated frequencies between 824 and 894 MHz. The AMPs network was upgraded to digital technology in 1990 and is still in use today in upgraded form.

One of the first truly successful commercial mobile phone networks to be available to the general public, called ARP, was set up in Finland in nineteen seventy one. ARP is sometimes thought of to as being a zero generation (0G) cellular network, in that the technology was more advanced than early systems such as MTB or RAT, but not as advanced as some of the formats that were to follow, such as AMPS, which are considered to be examples of the first generation of mobile phone technology as we now know it.

Vodafone offer a huge range of mobile phones and price plans. If you like smart phones, you will love the Google Phone with its fast internet for express browsing and downloads.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Customer Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.