If you’re not reading this on your mobile phone, stop right now and switch. Because today is the 38th 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 can still get a signal a lot farther from the nearest cell tower.
Cellular networks came to the US a bit later than in some other parts of the world, but the phones themselves are older than you think. The first device that really qualified as a “mobile phone” was patented in Finland in…get ready…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 network.
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. The system was launched in Sweden in 1956, but could support only a limited number of calls all at once.
Bell Labs kept working on the idea, but then they hired a consultant. The consultant’s Very Expensive Report explained that the whole market, worldwide, for “mobile phones” would never be more than 200,000 units. Not a particularly big market, particularly for Bell Systems. So they dropped the whole idea, thus missing out on what seems to be a slightly bigger market. They aren’t alone though — Xerox once designed a personal computer that worked like Windows or a Macintosh far before anybody else, but decided there was never going to be a big enough market for such a thing.
Meanwhile, mobile phone service was launched in Japan in 1979, and the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) service opened in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in 1981 — since it operated in four countries, NMT introduced the idea of “international roaming”.
Cellular signals were analog until the second generation of cell networks arrived in the early 1990s and introduced digital communications — no more static. There were various different “second generation” standards: 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. And never mind what those acronyms mean; they’re just different solutions to the same problem.
The multiple-standard problem meant that in the US, three duplicate cellular networks were built, using three different standards. And that meant three different sets of phones, phone stores, and all the rest of it. 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 all the phones were compatible. That led to improved service and lower pricing in those places, since the providers didn’t each have to fund their own cell network. It also meant people in most countries could go into any electronics store and pick out any phone, and it would work just fine with whatever carrier they chose.
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. A refinement called General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) became 2.5G, then there was 2.75G for “Edge” — which, believe it or not, was an acronym for “Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution.” I think that might have been a “backronym”, where they come up with “Edge” first then try to find words each letter would represent.
The acronyms got even worse after that. What most people called 3G was “UMTS”, the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, which also incorporated 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. Naturally all of those were mutually incompatible.
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. There really was something called "3D television” for a while, but it never really caught on, and I’m pretty sure there was never a mobile phone, 4G or not, that could actually display anything like 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 this one is just too silly to resist. Especially since the “long term” turned out to be just a few years.
And that brings us to 5G, which differs just enough from 4G to require everyone to buy a new phone (isn’t that a surprise). 5G networks change to 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, clouds, and fog.
So when you finally buy a 5G device, you can count on keeping it for a long time! Right? Well… maybe not, because 6G is already in the works. Several word-salad organizations have already assured us that it will be much better and use even higher frequencies, so we can look forward to downloading cat videos even more quickly.
But throughout it all, even though we seem to be expected to keep buying new phones all the time, 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.