Wireless Phones

Wireless phones have a long and varied history going back to Reginald Fessenden's invention and shore-to-ship exhibition of radio telephony, during the WWII with military use of radio telephony links and civil services in the 50s, while hand-held cellular radio devices have been only available since 1973. It is their low establishment costs and rapid deployment, that made cell phone and wireless phones networks spread rapidly throughout the entire planet, outstripping the growth of fixed telephony.

In 1945, the first generation (0G Network) of wireless phones was introduced. 0G wireless phones, such as Mobile Telephone Service, were not officially recognized as mobile phones since they did not support the automatic switch of channel frequency during calls, which allows the user to move from one base station coverage area to another, a feature called "handover". In 1983, Motorola DynaTAC was the first approved wireless phones by FCC. In 1984, Bell Labs invented such a "call handoff" feature, which allowed wireless phones users to move through several cells during the single call. Motorola Corp. is known to be the inventor of the first wireless phones for handheld use in a non-vehicle setting. Motorola manager Martin Cooper made the first call on a handheld mobile phone on April 3, 1973.

The first ever commercial cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT company in 1979. Later on, in the early to mid 1980s, fully automatic cellular networks were first introduced (the 1G generation) with the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in 1981. This was followed by a boom in wireless phones usage, particularly in Northern Europe. The first network technology based on digital 2G was launched by Radiolinja in 1991 in Finland on the GSM standard which also marked the introduction of competition in mobile telecoms when Radiolinja challenged incumbent Telecom Finland who ran a 1G NMT network.

A decade later, the first commercial launch of 3G (Third Generation of Cell Phone Technology) was once again in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard. Till the early 1990s, most mobile phones were too large to carry them in the pocket, so they were most of the time installed in vehicles as car phones. With the quick decrease in size of digital components, mobile phones have become increasingly portable over the last years.

Today, video and TV services are bringing forward the third generation (3G) deployment. And in the future, low cost, high-speed data is going to drive forward the fourth generation (4G) as short-range communication emerges rapidly around the world. Service and application ubiquity, with a great degree of customization and synchronization between various user appliances, will be another driver of such a switch in the technological wireless phones development direction. At the same time, it is quite possible that the radio access network is going to evolve from a centralized architecture to a distributed one.