Car phone

A car phone is a mobile radio telephone specifically designed for and fitted into an automobile.

On October 2, 1946, Motorola communications equipment carried the first calls on Illinois Bell Telephone Company's new car radiotelephone service in Chicago.

[2][3] Due to the small number of radio frequencies available, the service quickly reached capacity.

[4] In 1968, almost 22 years after the initial network, the US government started to consider reserving spectrum for land mobile radio communication, to be used by private persons.

This was succeeded in 1982 by the 1G system NMT (Nordic Mobile Telephone), used across Scandinavia and in other often remote areas.

Sweden started relatively early with plans for mobile telephony service trials at the end of the 1940s.

At the end of the 1950s, a trial system was built, using two channels, providing service for five mobile stations.

In 1971, it reached its capacity limit of almost 11,000 subscribers and was succeeded by the B-Netz in 1972, which featured direct dialing rather than a human operator to connect calls.

However, in order to reach a subscriber, one would still need to know their location since the handset would assume the local area code of the base station serving it.

[5] But the network was never used in East Germany (with one notable exception) due to fear by the Stasi of not having control over the communication.

A prototype of that telephone was briefly shown in a TV report about the development of the URTES network.

[7] Since a traditional car phone uses a high-power transmitter and external antenna, it is ideal for rural or undeveloped areas where mobile handsets may not work well or at all.

However, due to current U.S. Federal Communications Commission regulations, carriers must pay penalties for activating any equipment that is not an E911 compliant device, such as analog.