Stephen Hearnden THE HISTORY OF MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS It seems inconceivable that mobile communication is barely 50 years old. Here, Stephen Hearnden charts the progress from the early radiopaging services right through to the present day and provides a flavour of what we can expect in the future. He also explores the societal changes that have occurred with the advent of near-universal use of mobile devices. THE EARLY DAYS for more characters became essential only nine frequency channels though! It is impossible to underestimate the and the Post Office developed a stan- It’s hard to imagine only nine calls be- importance of mobile communica- dard giving a capacity of 80 alpha- ing made in London at the same time! tions and how they have changed our numeric characters; but again it was To operate, a mobile call was initi- lives. From the ability to make and only one-way. In the 1980s there ated by lifting the handset, manually receive calls almost anywhere in the were around 3.2 million users of pag- selecting a free channel and pressing world seamlessly, to being able to ac- ers worldwide and by the 1990s this the call button (specific channels were cess the Internet whilst on the move, peaked at around 22 million. Then, used in specific areas, busy channels of the many inventions of the last 50 with the advent of cellular, the services were indicated by an engaged light years, mobile communication must be began to decline and, although there To call a mobile from a fixed tele- near the top in the effect it has had on were newer paging services including phone it was necessary to call the ra- people’s lives. two-way ones, they only continued as diophone operator by dialling 140 (in The first mobile communication a niche service. Hutchinson's (now London) and requesting the 5-digit services that became available were 3 in the UK) national paging service number of the mobile to which you developed in the early 1970s in the UK closed in 2000. wished to be connected. The opera- and a little earlier in the US. These In parallel with the roll-out of pag- tor would key in the number which were one-way paging services that ing services there were attempts to would be transmitted using a 5-tone sent a telephone number to a user in develop radiophone services. These, sequence to all mobiles on the calling the field with a small pocket pager. like the paging services, were limited channel. Some of these services were limited to in their capabilities and also suffered Radiophone 3, the successor ser- a site, for example a hospital or uni- from a lack of frequency spectrum. vice, had 55 channels and, although it versity campus, and some were re- Radiophone System 1, the very first was a manual system, it was still an gionally based. public mobile telephone service in the operator-connected half duplex sys- This required the operator who UK, was made available in 1959. It tem. It was replaced by Radiophone was paging the individual to know was of limited capacity and provided 4 in 1983 which was an automatic ser- what region the person was in. As coverage in the South Lancashire area. vice. In both cases to ring the phone it was a one-way service with no ac- It was not until 1965 that service it was necessary to know in which re- knowledgement, the operator had no was made available in London. The gion the called party was located. To idea whether the message had been launch coincided with the opening of increase capacity, the channel spacing received. Soon there became a de- the Post Office Tower which was the was reduced from 25 to 12.5kHz which mand for a national service and the location for the base station transmit- gave a total of 95 channels. It didn’t Post Office (PO) in the UK deployed a ters covering the central London area. take long with the erlang tables to see network of paging sites and offered a The launch of System 2 saw the be- that the total capacity was limited to national service. ginning of the ever-increasing rise in around 10 –15,000 users. There were As the service developed, the need popularity of the mobile phone. It had many more but these were illegal! It #! !!" !! 9ROXPH3DUW #$%!&'()*+,!'-!#$%!.*/#.#(#%!'-!#%,%0'11(*.0+#.'*/!2)'-%//.'*+,/ was said in those days that, because allocated the 900MHz band for a pan- there was a long waiting list for ser- European cellular radio system and vice, the PO had developed waiting list allowed countries to offer interim ser- management into an art form. It was vices in these bands. Therefore the clear another solution had to be found. frequency bands selected were 890 to 905 and 935 to 950MHz. An addition- CELLULAR - THE EARLY YEARS al 10 +10MHz was reserved for what In May 1982 Kenneth Baker, the was to become the Global System for Minister of State for Information and Mobile (GSM) communications direct- Technology in the Department for ly above these bands. Cellnet opted Trade and Industry, received a joint for a 12-cell repeat pattern at launch approach from Securicor (a parcels moving to a 4-cell repeat pattern after delivery company) and BT Enterprises about two years and used Motorola By the 1990s there were some to form a joint company subsequently equipment. Racal Vodafone opted for 22 million people using pagers. known as Telecom Securicor Cellular a 7-cell repeat pattern using Ericsson Radio Ltd (Cellnet) with a request to equipment. GSM AND 3G offer a UK nationwide cellular service. The operators weren’t allowed to The standard for GSM was started in The venture was 51% owned by BT offer service to the end customer at 1983 and by 1987 the parameters for and 49% by Securicor and subse- that time so a network of service pro- the air interface were decided, allow- quently became 60/40%. viders and dealers was established, ing European countries to start in ear- During this time telecommunica- most selling on both networks. The nest planning for new digital cellular tions regulation changed and, with the opening tariffs were £25 per month radio networks. At that time only a new Telecommunications Act 1983, and 25 pence per minute. Allowing few countries had competition, most this opened up the market to com- for inflation these figures are very only had the incumbent PTT op- petition for the first time. Another high by today’s standards. erator. However, by the time of the company, Racal Vodafone, bid for the As a personal aside, I joined Cell- 1992 launch of GSM in the UK, most second licence which was granted in net six weeks after the launch when countries launched with two opera- 1983 and two years later the two op- we had one mobile switching centre tors. Germany had an aggressive erators launched within days of each in the network and eight base stations new entrant operator that was anx- other in January 1985. The licences with 1500 customers (February 1985). ious to steal a march on the Deutche were granted for 25 years. The business plan I inherited showed Telecom, the incumbent operator, In the two years leading up to the a growth of 20,000 customers by 1995 but was stymied by the lack of type- launch there was intense activity to (10 years) but we exceeded that in approved mobiles leading to GSM be- decide on a standard and to free-up seven months. Racal Vodafone had ing renamed ‘God Send Mobiles’! spectrum for the two operators. Much similar growth. It was clear that both Originally it was seen that up to of the research work on the air inter- operators had dramatically under- 18 countries would adopt GSM in Eu- face standard was done at the BT re- estimated the market possibly due to rope, but in the event it has become a search laboratories in Suffolk. The re- the pent-up demand that couldn’t be truly global standard with operators sults were presented to a joint industry satisfied by older radiotelephone sys- now in 219 countries. It is a credit Government group run by the Depart- tems. to the designers of the standard that ment for Trade and Industry. Even with high tariffs and a sub- it has been capable of expansion, Several existing standards were in- sequent increase in the per-minute not only in terms of numbers of cus- vestigated including the Nordic Mobile charge inside the M25 (the London or- tomers, but in terms of numbers of Telephone standard (NMT450/900) bital motorway) to choke off conges- networks it can support with roam- and the North American Advance Mo- tion (unsuccessfully), the customer ing. The key improvements of GSM bile Phone service (AMPs) standard. base continued to grow and, at a peak, over TACS was the security from Eventually it was decided to adapt the the networks had around 1.5 million overhearing and cloning it offered, AMPs standard for European use, i.e. customers each. Network investment as well as better aural quality, capac- a 25kHz not a 30kHz channel plan to ran at £200m per year and, after three ity for the operators, a text messag- fit in with European practice. This be- years, additional spectrum was found, ing capability and of course roam- came known as TACS - Total Access termed Extended TACS, which gave ing. Also, the use of the Subscriber Communications System. It was an each operator a total of 660 channels.