Mobile phone

An evolution of mobile phones

A hand-held mobile radiotelephone is an old dream of radio engineering. A partic
ularly vivid and in many ways accurate prediction was presented by Arthur C. Cla
rke in a 1959 essay, where he envisioned a "personal transceiver, so small and c
ompact that every man carries one." He wrote: "the time will come when we will b
e able to call a person anywhere on Earth merely by dialing a number." Such a de
vice would also, in Clarke's vision, include means for global positioning so tha
t "no one need ever again be lost." Later, in Profiles of the Future, he predict
ed the advent of such a device taking place in the mid-1980s.[8]
Early predecessors of cellular phones included analog radio communications from
ships and trains. The race to create truly portable telephone devices began afte
r World War II, with developments taking place in many countries. The advances i
n mobile telephony have been traced in successive generations from the early "0G
" (zeroth generation) services like the Bell System's Mobile Telephone Service a
nd its successor, Improved Mobile Telephone Service. These "0G" systems were not
cellular, supported few simultaneous calls, and were very expensive.
The first handheld mobile cell phone was demonstrated by Motorola in 1973. The f
irst commercial automated cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979.
In 1981, this was followed by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Tele
phone (NMT) system in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.[9] Several other coun
tries then followed in the early to mid-1980s. These first generatiion ("1G") sy
stems could support far more simultaneous calls, but still used analog technolog
y.
In 1991, the second generation (2G) digital cellular technology was launched in
Finland by Radiolinja on the GSM standard, which sparked competition in the sect
or, as the new operators challenged the incumbent 1G network operators.
Ten years later, in 2001, the third generation (3G) was launched in Japan by NTT
DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard.[10] This was followed by 3.5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G en
hancements based on the high-speed packet access (HSPA) family, allowing UMTS ne
tworks to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.
By 2009, it had become clear that, at some point, 3G networks would be overwhelm
ed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming media.[11] C
onsequently, the industry began looking to data-optimized 4th-generation technol
ogies, with the promise of speed improvements up to 10-fold over existing 3G tec
hnologies. The first two commercially available technologies billed as 4G were t
he WiMAX standard (offered in the U.S. by Sprint) and the LTE standard, first of
fered in Scandinavia by TeliaSonera.