Thursday, 11 April 2013

THE MOBILE PHONE REVOLUTION!


  A BRIEF HISTORY

The concept of mobile phones, hsbc swift bank code or cellular phones as they are also known, was born in the late 1940s, in the United Kingdom and the U.S.A. Researchers studied, the then current police mobile (radio) car phones, and worked out that by limiting the range or 'service area' of transmitters, they could re-use the same radio frequencies over and over again. This allowed them to theories the possibility that with this technology, many users would be able to share the same network. They were unable to put a production system together to prove this theory, as there simply wasn't the computer technology available at that time.
It wasn't until 1971 that ATT and Bell Labs proposed the first commercial cellular, mobile phone network. The long delay was not just to do with technological limitations of the time, it was for the most part due to the American FCC limiting the spectrum of radio frequencies made available for mobile communications. The proposal was for a cellular network, which was to consist of many small broadcast towers, covering a small area (termed a 'cell'), a couple of miles in radius. As the mobile phone user moved across this network, his/her call would be automatically passed on from tower to tower. It took the FCC until 1982 to approve this proposal.
Interestingly enough it wasn't the USA that launched the world's first commercial cellular network service. The first was by NTT of Japan, in 1979. The first fully automatic, first generation cellular network (known as 1G), was developed by Nordic Mobile Telephone in 1981. 1G was still based on analog radio signals. Second generation (2G) digital cellular networks arrived in 1991. High speed, third generation (3G) cellular networks became a reality when the Japanese company NTT DoCoMo rolled out it's commercial WCDMA network.
Mobile phones are not the bricks that they were a few decades ago. Today's mobile phones are small enough to slip in to your pocket but also powerful enough to surf the internet, send emails and even make video calls. There are many different mobile phone manufacturers. Some of the biggest include; Nokia, Sony and Motorola