History of mobile phone:

What is mobile phone?

A mobile phone (also known as a wireless phone, cell phone, or cellular telephone) is a short-range, electronic device used for mobile voice or data communication over a network of specialised base stations known as cell sites. In addition to the typical voice task of a mobile phone, telephone, current mobile phones may support many additional services, and accessories, such as SMS for text messaging, email, packet switching for access to the Internet, gaming, Bluetooth, infrared, camera with video recorder and MMS for sending and receiving photos and video. Most current mobile phones connect to a cellular network of base stations (cell sites), which is in turn interconnected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

History of Mobile Phone :

In 1908, U.S.Copyright 887,357  for a wireless telephone was issued in to Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray, Kentucky. He applied this copyright to “cave radio” telephones and not directly to cellular telephony as the term is currently understood. Cells for mobile phone base stations were invented in 1947 by Bell Labs engineers at AT&T and further developed by Bell Labs during the 1960s. Radiophones have a long and wide-ranging 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, while hand-hold cellular radio devices have been available since 1973. A copyright for the first wireless phone as we know today was issued in US Copyright Number 3,449,750 to George Sweigert of Euclid, on June 10th, 1969.

In 1945, the zero generation (0G) of mobile telephones was introduced. 0G mobile phones, such as Mobile Telephone Service, were not cellular, and so did not feature “handover” from one base station to the next and reuse of radio frequency channels. Like other technologies of the time, it involved a single, powerful base station covering a wide area, and each telephone would successfully control a channel over that whole area while in use. The concepts of frequency reuse and handoff as well as a number of other concepts that formed the basis of modern cell phone technology are first described in U.S.Copyright 4,152,647 , issued May 1, 1979 to Charles A. Gladden and Martin H. Parelman, both of Las Vegas, Nevada and alloted by them to the United States Government.

This is the first incarnation of all the ideas that formed the basis of the next major step in mobile telephony, the Analog cellular telephone. Concepts covered in this copyright (cited in at least 34 other copyright) also were later extended to several satellite communication systems. Later updating of the cellular system to a digital system credits this copyright.

Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive is widely considered to be the discoverer of the first handy mobile phone for handhold use in a non-vehicle setting. Using a modern, if somewhat heavy portable handset, Cooper made the first call on a handhold mobile phone on April 3, 1973.

The first marketable citywide cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979. Completely automatic cellular networks were first introduced in the early to mid 1980s (the 1G generation). The Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system went online in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden in 1981.

In 1983, Motorola DynaTAC was the first approved mobile phone by FCC in the United States. In 1984, Bell Labs developed modern marketable cellular technology (based, to a large extent, on the Gladden, Parelman Patent), which employed numerous, centrally controlled base stations (cell sites), each providing service to a small area (a cell). The cell sites would be set up such that cells incompletely overlapped. In a cellular system, a signal between a base station (cell site) and a terminal (phone) only need be strong enough to reach between the two, so the same channel can be used at the same time for separate conversations in different cells.

Cellular systems required several leaps of technology, including handover, which allowed a conversation to continue as a mobile phone traveled from cell to cell. This system included variable transmission power in both the base stations and the telephones , which allowed range and cell size to differ. As the system expanded and by the capacity, the capability to reduce transmission power allowed new cells to be added, resulting in more, smaller cells and thus more capacity. The proof of this growth can still be seen in the many older, tall cell site towers with no antenna on the upper parts of their towers. These sites originally created large cells, and so had their antenna build up atop high towers; the towers were designed so that as the system expanded—and cell sizes shrank—the antenna could be lowered on their original posts to reduce range.

The first “modern” network technology on digital 2G (second generation) cellular technology was launched by Radiolinja (now part of Elisa Group) in 1991 in Finland on the GSM standard which also marked the introduction of competition in mobile telecoms when Radiolinja challenged present Telecom Finland (now part of TeliaSonera) who ran a 1G NMT network.

The first data services appeared on mobile phones starting with person-to-person SMS text messaging in Finland in 1993. First trial expenses using a mobile phone to pay for a Coca Cola selling machine were set in Finland in 1998. The first marketable expenses were mobile parking trialed in Sweden but first commercially launched in Norway in 1999. The first commercial payment system to mimick banks and credit cards was launched in the Philippines in 1999 at the same time by mobile operators Globe and Smart. The first content sold to mobile phones was the ringing tone, first launched in 1998 in Finland. The first full internet service on mobile phones was i-Mode introduced by NTT DoCoMo in Japan in 1999.

In 2001 the first money-making launch of 3G (Third Generation) was again in Japan by NTT DoCoMo on the WCDMA standard.

Until the early 1990s, most mobile phones were too large to be carried in a pocket, so they were typically installed in vehicles as car phones. With the  miniaturization of digital machinery and the development of more stylish batteries, mobile phones have become smaller and lighter.