Dr Martin
Cooper, former general manager for the systems division at Motorola, was believed to be the inventor of the first modern potable handset.
Although Bell Laboratories
brought in the idea of cellular communications in 1947 with the police car technology, and constructed the finest landline
telephone system in the world, they didn’t seem to be truly committed to mobile telephony at all. Instead, it was Motorola
who integrated technology into the portable device that was created to be used outside an automobile.
By 1977, AT&T
and Bell Labs came up with a cellular system model and one year down, public trials for the new system, was conducted in Chicago with
more than 2000 trial customers.
In 1979, Tokyo
started her frist commercial cellular telephone system operation and two years later, Motorola and American Radio telephone
conducted a second test on the US radio-telephone system in
Washington.
At last in 1982,
the slow-moving FCC approved commercial service for the USA,
and in 1983, the first Advance Mobile Phone Service (AMPS) was made available in Chicago
by Ameritech.
Regardless of the
huge demand, cellular phone service took 37 years to be commercially available in the States. Consumer demand quickly exceeded
the 1982 system standards, and by 1987, there were more than 1 million mobile phone subscribers, overcrowding the airways.
To improve these
services, there were 3 ways: increase frequency allocation, splitting up existing cells as well as improving the technology.
However, FCC refused to give any more bandwidth, and felt that building or breaking up of cells would be costly and would
add load to the network. Therefore, they decided to work on improving and encouraging the growth of technology. In order to
do so, in 1987, FCC announced that cellular licensees could adopt alternative cellular technologies in the 800MHz band. Research
on new tramission technology as an alternative was then carried out in the cellular industry.
In 1988, the Cellular
Technology Industry Association (CITA) was set up to cooperate with the service operators and researchers to single out new
technology requirements and set goals. They wanted the new products and services to be launched by 1991, a 1000% increase
in system capacity with both AMPS (analog) and digital capability during transmission, with messaging and fax features.
The Telecommunications
Industry Association (TIA) made a standard specification based on what the CITA have set. Three major standards have been
released since 1991. All of them are now being used in Personal Communication Services.