We Could Have Had Cellphones Four Decades Earlier

Megalith

Megalith

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If it weren’t for poor estimates and bias for dominant services, cellphone usage could have been ubiquitous decades earlier. From what I can process so far, the primary reasons for the delay appear to be the FCC wanting to give television all the bandwidth, and greedy companies attempting to secure monopolies despite the financial potential of mobile. Apparently, the first cellular call with a mobile handset was made in 1973 by Motorola’s then-Vice President.

The basic idea of the cellphone was introduced to the public in 1945—not in Popular Mechanics or Science, but in the down-home Saturday Evening Post. Millions of citizens would soon be using "handie-talkies," declared J.K. Jett, the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Licenses would have to be issued, but that process "won't be difficult." The revolutionary technology, Jett promised in the story, would be formulated within months. But permission to deploy it would not. The government would not allocate spectrum to realize the engineers' vision of "cellular radio" until 1982, and licenses authorizing the service would not be fully distributed for another seven years. That's one heck of a bureaucratic delay.
 
Interesting thought, but even if the spectrum were allocated and licenses issued it probably wouldn't have accelerated things too much. Technology and manufacturing also had to catch up. Not too many people would have been interested in carrying around a tube-based "cellphone" weighing about the same as a console TV. When introduced in the early 80s AMPS based phones were stretching the technology of their day.

But it is amusing to consider...
 
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I got my first cell phone in 1994. Motorola flip phone, where the flip part covered the buttons.
 
So basically the breakup of AT&T under the monopoly laws allowed cellular technology to finally get off the ground.....I wonder if this has any correlation with the ridiculous "CB Radio" craze that sprung up in the late 70's.....
 
PigLover said:
Interesting thought, but even if the spectrum were allocated and licenses issued it probably wouldn't have accelerated things too much. Technology and manufacturing also had to catch up. Not too many people would have been interested in carrying around a tub-based "cellphone" weighing about the same as a console TV. When introduced in the early 80s AMPS based phones were stretching the technology of their day.

But it is amusing to consider...
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Yeah, remember most useful cell phones fit in briefcases or cars in the 1980s. Anyone who dreamed about viable portable telephones before the 1990s need only look at professional Walkie Talkies, which were huge, expensive and burned through batteries in an hour or two of on-time. Not what you would call "convenience." But a nice evolution from the car CBs of the 70s.
 
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This reminds me of the US and Internet services and costs. Slow speeds higher cost. Lots of lobbying to Congress to keep gouging us for the internet.
 
Anyone that tries to bring a product to market knows that everything has to come together just right or nothing flies.

Other people would simply say that we got cellphones exactly when the world was ready for cellphones.
 
lcpiper said:
Anyone that tries to bring a product to market knows that everything has to come together just right or nothing flies.

Other people would simply say that we got cellphones exactly when the world was ready for cellphones.
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To an extent yes. Certainly there are other uses for cellular voice and data connections, but yeah getting the electronics small enough, getting batteries that work worth a shit, display technology, general manufacturing practices, etc. are what made them start actually becoming usable in the 90's for people.
 
Zepher said:
I got my first cell phone in 1994. Motorola flip phone, where the flip part covered the buttons.
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My mom had one of those. I think it was this one.
motorola-flip.jpg


I had a rich uncle who had a cell back in the early 80s. It was pretty bulky, mostly wide, and the antenna was like 2 feet long I shit you not.
 
They weren't much different when I first entered service.

But what was more awesome than a PRC-77 Radio?

The GRA-39 is what.

See, I worked in MI, I did RADAR Intercept. Sounds safe enough except that it's not enough for us to drive up onto a mountaintop somewhere and listen for enemy RADARs, when we hear one, we have to radio the other teams and tell them what frequency to check so that we can all get a line of bearing, a direction, to the RADAR that's making the noise. Triangulation, it's old school but it worked as long as everyone on the team can hear the same signal. The scary part was reporting what you found. It took time to transmit a voice message with all the technical details of the signal, and in war time, any radio broadcasting from a mountaintop is a target to be killed quickly.

This is where the beauty of the GRA-39 comes into play. See it is made up of two components. The first component is connected to your radio with a short cable. Then you use WD-1 field phone wire to connect the fist component to the second component allowing you to "remote" your radio for up to two miles.

This means I can take my other vehicle, a Jeep, later a HUMVEE, that also has a radio, and connect the GRA-39 to this vehicle's radio and drive it off several hundred yards and cammo it up. Then I attach a radio antennae that boosts my range by a good bit and again, allows me to separate the radio from the vehicle by a fair distance. And in this way, with some luck, I might be able to live awhile longer in a very hostile world.

Of course, it really is only good until the first time the enemy gets serious and kills my other vehicle with radio and half of my GRA-39. After that it's down to calling in our message and running like hell :unsure:
 
Wow, imagine a world where people could have been texting and driving before airbags were invented.
 
This was broadcast by the BBC in 1979... Note is was a DIGITAL system just like today's GSM / LTE phones unlike the early (and huge) analogue mobile phones of the 80's / early 90's. It was created by Nokia + Seimens UK, sigh.



btw Tormorrow's World rocked.... and it's coming back to the beeb this year :D
 
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PigLover said:
Interesting thought, but even if the spectrum were allocated and licenses issued it probably wouldn't have accelerated things too much. Technology and manufacturing also had to catch up. Not too many people would have been interested in carrying around a tube-based "cellphone" weighing about the same as a console TV. When introduced in the early 80s AMPS based phones were stretching the technology of their day.

But it is amusing to consider...
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Also, before self-tuning radios, you'd have to manually dial into a new frequency every time you moved cell sites. Also, if your frequency was too crowded (which could be just one other caller on your channel becau) because automatic time-division multiplexing wasn't really a thing until the 60's or 70's. Which means, even if they developed it earlier, you'd have to change your time slot manually as well.

Consumer cellphones, even for rich people, cannot exist without miniaturized computers. It's too much work to leave that kind of management to untrained users. You'd need a radio operator's license to get it right.
 
NickJames said:
My mom had one of those. I think it was this one.
motorola-flip.jpg


I had a rich uncle who had a cell back in the early 80s. It was pretty bulky, mostly wide, and the antenna was like 2 feet long I shit you not.
Click to expand...

Ah the Motorola MicroTac.
 
I am kind of thankful. I got to enjoy a few more decades of not being connected 24/7 to the rest of the world. Don't get me wrong, I love cell phones, they are certainly useful, but I hate the expectation of always being available, always being in touch, that comes with them. Every rose has it's thorns.
 
I don't understand the issue...
* In Sweden the first public commercial cell phone service started in 1956. There were 26 subscribers to the service utilising a car-bound phone weighting about 46 kg.
* The first more broadly adopted service (around here) was NMT (Nordisk MobilTelefoni) around 1980, a joint effort covering the Nordic countries with 450 MHz portable analogue phones.
 
negative, cellular required technology that was not available back when this was first dreamed up in the late 1940's. Radio phones used by the US Military during that time is not the same as a cellular based (analog or digital) network that is in use today.
 
Olle P said:
I don't understand the issue...
* In Sweden the first public commercial cell phone service started in 1956. There were 26 subscribers to the service utilising a car-bound phone weighting about 46 kg.
* The first more broadly adopted service (around here) was NMT (Nordisk MobilTelefoni) around 1980, a joint effort covering the Nordic countries with 450 MHz portable analogue phones.
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What is called "the first commercial cell phone service" here was actually a radio-telephone system. Single frequency radio-based telephones bound to a very small number of towers, which each phone able to select one of 3 or 4 radio channels to get a "dial tone", with limited "mobile termination" capabilities and no concept of handing off a call from tower to tower as you moved. Very simplistic, very limited. Radio-telephone systems like these were also deployed in the rural-midwest of the USA throughout the '60s and 70s.

NMT was launched in the early 1980s. AMPS in the USA was launched in 1984. They are essentially contemporaneous launches of the same/similar tech, albeit operating at different radio bands and with other incompatibilities in signaling details, etc. In fact, having two independently developed systems show up commercially at about the same time using similar technology supports the idea that cellular emerged when the technology and manufacturing methods would support it - and the "social manipulation" suggested in the article spawning this thread has little to no impact at all on the timing.
 
Nonsense. The technology wasn't ready yet.
We got cell phones when they where a viable product.

People who believe we could have had functional cell phones for the masses in the early 70's, probably still believe the evil oil companies are hiding technology that would allow cars to get 200 mpg.
 
nutzo said:
Nonsense. The technology wasn't ready yet.
We got cell phones when they where a viable product.

People who believe we could have had functional cell phones for the masses in the early 70's, probably still believe the evil oil companies are hiding technology that would allow cars to get 200 mpg.
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Sort of.

The obvious driver for anyone to spend money researching a product is to make money selling it. If the FCC sat on the airwave licensing for 40ish years, nobody's going to sink millions into R&D when they can't sell it. If airwave licensing for it was available in the 50's, research would have started then.

Would it have been /good/ tech? No. But it would have been out, and we'd have had common place cells probably 10-15 years earlier.
 
Guarana [BAWLS] said:
Sort of.

The obvious driver for anyone to spend money researching a product is to make money selling it. If the FCC sat on the airwave licensing for 40ish years, nobody's going to sink millions into R&D when they can't sell it. If airwave licensing for it was available in the 50's, research would have started then.

Would it have been /good/ tech? No. But it would have been out, and we'd have had common place cells probably 10-15 years earlier.
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That's a huge probably.

Look, there are a few people who still have old fashioned land line phones, a few. But even my 82 year old Dad has given up his land line phones for a cell because as soon as you buy a cell phone, you start to realize that the old land line isn't worth paying for anymore. Conversely, until cell phones got cheap enough to be affordable for the masses AND compact enough to become a true personal device, there was no compelling reason to buy into cell technology for the masses. Special cases yes, but for everyone, no way.

Everything had to come together to make the cell phone a personal device for everyone. FCC control of the air waves was only one part.
 
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