A Mobile phone or Mobile (also called cellphone and handphone ) is an electronic device used for mobile telecommunications (mobile telephony, text messaging or data transmission) over a cellular network of specialized base stations known as cell sites. Mobile phones differ from cordless telephones, which only offer telephony service within a limited range, e.g. within a home or an office, through a fixed line and a base station owned by the subscriber and also from satellite phones and radio telephones. As opposed to a radio telephone, a cell phone offers full duplex communication, automatised calling to and paging from a public land mobile network (PLMN), and handoff (handover) during a phone call when the user moves from one cell (base station coverage area) to another. Most current cell phones connect to a cellular network consisting of switching points and base stations (cell sites) owned by a mobile network operator. In addition to the standard voice function, 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, MP3 player, radio and GPS.
The International Telecommunication Union estimated that mobile cellular subscriptions worldwide would reach approximately 4.6 billion by the end of 2009. Mobile phones have gained increased importance in the sector of Information and communication technologies for development in the 2000s and have effectively started to reach the bottom of the economic pyramid.History
Main article: History of mobile phonesIn 1908, U.S. Patent 887,357 for a wireless telephone was issued to Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray, Kentucky. He applied this patent 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 varied 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-held mobile radio devices have been available since 1973. A patent for the first wireless phone as we know today was issued in US Patent Number 3,449,750 to George Sweigert of Euclid, Ohio on June 10, 1969.
In 1945, the zero generation (0G) of mobile telephones was introduced. Like other technologies of the time, it involved a single, powerful base station covering a wide area, and each telephone would effectively monopolize a channel over that whole area while in use.
In 1960, the world’s first partly automatic car phone system Mobile System A (MTA)|MTA was launched in Sweden. With MTA, calls could be made and received in the car to/from the public telephone network, and the car phone could be paged. The phone number was dialed using a rotary dial. Calling from the car was fully automatic, while calling to it required an operator. The person who wanted to call a mobile phone had to know which base station the mobile phone was covered by. The system was developed by Sture Laurén and other engineers at Televerket network operator. Ericsson provided the switchboard while Svenska Radioaktiebolaget (SRA) owned by Ericsson and Marconi provided the telephones and base station equipment. MTA phones were consisted of vacuum tubes and relays, and had a weight of 40 kg. In 1962, a more modern version called Mobile System B (MTB) was launched which used transistors in order to enhance the telephone’s calling capacity and improve its operational reliability. In 1971 the MTD version was launched, opening for several different brands of equipment and gaining commercial success.
The concepts of frequency reuse and handoff, as well as a number of other concepts that formed the basis of modern cell phone technology, were described in the 1970s; see for example Fluhr and Nussbaum, Hachenburg et al. , and U.S. Patent 4,152,647 , issued May 1, 1979 to Charles A. Gladden and Martin H. Parelman, both of Las Vegas, Nevada and assigned by them to the United States Government.
Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive is considered to be the inventor of the first practical mobile phone for hand-held use in a non-vehicle setting. Cooper is the first inventor named on "Radio telephone system" filed on October 17 , 1973 with the US Patent Office and later issued as US Patent 3,906,166; other named contributors on the patent included Cooper's boss, John F. Mitchell, Motorola's chief of portable communication products, who successfully pushed Motorola to develop wireless communication products that would be small enough to use outside the home, office or automobile and participated in the design of the cellular phone. Using a modern, if somewhat heavy portable handset, Cooper made the first call on a hand-held mobile phone on April 3, 1973 to a rival, Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.
Analog cellular telephony (1G)
Main article: 1GThe first commercial fully automated cellular network (the 1G generation) was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979. The initial launch network covered the full metropolitan area of Tokyo's over 20 million inhabitants with a cellular network of 23 base stations. Within five years, the NTT network had been expanded to cover the whole population of Japan and became the first nation-wide 2G network.
The second launch of 1G networks was the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden in 1981.. NMT was the first mobile phone network featuring international roaming. The Swedish electrical engineer Östen Mäkitalo started to work on this vision in 1966, and is considered as the father of the NMT system and some consider him also the father of the cellular phone.
Several countries were among the early to launch 1G networks in the early 1980s including the UK, Mexico and Canada. The first 1G network launched in the USA was Chicago based Ameritech in 1983 using the famous first hand-held mobile phone Motorola DynaTAC. In 1984, Bell Labs developed modern commercial cellular technology (based, to a large extent, on the Gladden, Parelman Patent), which employed multiple, 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 partially 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 simultaneously for separate conversations in different cells.
The first NMT installations as well as the First AMPS installations were based on the Ericsson AXE digital exchange nodes.
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 (controlled by the base stations), which allowed range and cell size to vary. As the system expanded and neared capacity, the ability to reduce transmission power allowed new cells to be added, resulting in more, smaller cells and thus more capacity. The evidence of this growth can still be seen in the many older, tall cell site towers with no antennae on the upper parts of their towers. These sites originally created large cells, and so had their antennae mounted atop high towers; the towers were designed so that as the system expanded—and cell sizes shrank—the antennae could be lowered on their original masts to reduce range.
Digital mobile communication (2G)
Main articles: 2G, 2.5G, and 2.75GThe 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 incumbent 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 payments using a mobile phone to pay for a Coca Cola vending machine were set in Finland in 1998. The first commercial payments were mobile parking trialled in Sweden but first commercially launched in Norway in 1999. The first commercial payment system to mimic banks and credit cards was launched in the Philippines in 1999 simultaneously 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 se
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