Foreword: Wireless Communication—History and Visions

How did we arrive at our current state of tHe art? Pre-Cellular Mobile Telephony In order to understand where we're going, we need to understand how we arrived at today's state of the art. The notion of reliable mobile telephone service was first introduced in the 1950's. The first widely deployed system was developed by AT&T Bell Laboratories in the United States and referred to as Mobile Telephone Service (MTS). MTS was fairly simple, comprising 1) a mobile analogue FM transceiver capable of operating on either 8 or 16 radio frequency channels in the vehicle, 2) a wide coverage FM base station transceiver and 3) an operator-assisted switching centre, by which calls were manually connected and disconnected to an outside party (Sarkar, Mailloux, Oliner, Salazar-Palma, & Sengupta, 2005). The mobile transceiver was extremely large, weighing 20 kilos or more and therefore was usually mounted in the trunk of the vehicle. A cable was run from the transceiver to the vehicle interior, where the user could operate the device using a control head and a telephone handset. To place a call from the mobile, the user would first observe the " busy " light on the mobile control unit. If the system were available, the user would then lift the handset and press the " talk " switch to call the mobile operator and request that a number be dialled. The operator would then connect the audio lines from the Public Switched Telephone System (PSTN) to the mobile audio interface, and the call could proceed. Between 1964 and 1969, AT&T introduced the Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS). The primary improvement was that automated switching replaced the need for manual involvement by a telephone operator. IMTS enabled users to place calls themselves using a dial installed on the mobile control head. Likewise, incoming calls were automatically routed to the mobile station, where the user was alerted by an alert tone (Gascoigne, 1974; Harte, 2006). MTS and IMTS were fairly crude in contrast to the smart phones of today, but these systems were revolutionary for their time. They were truly technical substitutes for fixed-line telephony, and this is the way the consumer mobile communication industry remained for many years. Throughout the 1970's, adoption of MTS and IMTS service in the United States was rapid, and in the mean time similar services were introduced in Europe. From a market segmentation viewpoint, the subscribers of …