History of mobile phones

While the transmission of speech by signal has a long history, the first devices that were wireless, mobile, and also capable of connecting to the standard telephone network are much more recent.

Drastic changes have taken place in both the networking of wireless communication and the prevalence of its use, with smartphones becoming common globally and a growing proportion of Internet access now done via mobile broadband.

[2] In 1917, the Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt successfully filed a patent for a "pocket-size folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone".

In 1906, the English caricaturist Lewis Baumer published a cartoon in Punch entitled "Forecasts for 1907"[4] in which he showed a man and a woman in London's Hyde Park each separately engaged in gambling and dating on wireless-telegraphy equipment.

[6][7] In 1923, Ilya Ehrenburg casually listed "pocket telephones" among the achievements of contemporary technology in a story in his collection Thirteen Pipes (Russian: Тринадцать трубок).

[8] In 1926, the artist Karl Arnold drew a visionary cartoon about the use of mobile phones in the street, in the picture "wireless telephony", published in the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus.

The commercial introduction (in Japan in 1979) of cellular technology, which allowed re-use of frequencies many times in small adjacent areas covered by relatively low-powered transmitters, made widespread adoption of mobile telephones economically feasible.

[13] In 1965, the Bulgarian company "Radioelektronika" presented a mobile automatic phone combined with a base station at the Inforga-65 international exhibition in Moscow.

[15] In the UK, there was also a vehicle-based system called "Post Office Radiophone Service",[17] which was launched around the city of Manchester in 1959, and although it required callers to speak to an operator, it was possible to be put through to any subscriber in Great Britain.

In December 1947, Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones in vehicles.

Two decades would pass before Richard H. Frenkiel, Joel S. Engel and Philip T. Porter of Bell Labs expanded the early proposals into a much more detailed system plan.

In 1970, Amos E. Joel, Jr., a Bell Labs engineer,[22] invented a "three-sided trunk circuit" to aid in the "call handoff" process from one cell to another.

This system was a direct dial up service through their local switchboard, and was installed in many private vehicles including grain combines, trucks, and automobiles.

[34] Commonly referred to as "the Brick", it was not commercially launched until October 1983,[35] and only then in the U.S. John F. Mitchell,[36][37][38] Motorola's chief of portable communication products and Cooper's boss in 1973, played a key role in advancing the development of handheld mobile telephone equipment.

Mitchell successfully pushed Motorola to develop wireless communication products that would be small enough to use anywhere and participated in the design of the cellular phone.

It was unencrypted and easily vulnerable to eavesdropping via a scanner; it was susceptible to cell phone "cloning" and it used a Frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) scheme and required significant amounts of wireless spectrum to support.

This change was possible not only through technological improvements such as more advanced batteries and more energy-efficient electronics, but also because of the higher density of cell sites to accommodate increasing usage.

The latter meant that the average distance transmission from phone to the base station shortened, leading to increased battery life while on the move.

The advent of prepaid services in the late 1990s soon made SMS the communication method of choice among the young, a trend which spread across all ages.

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 high connection speeds of 3G technology enabled a transformation in the industry: for the first time, media streaming of radio (and even television) content to 3G handsets became possible,[50] with companies such as RealNetworks[51] and Disney[52] among the early pioneers in this type of offering.

Thus, 4G ushered in a treatment of voice calls just like any other type of streaming audio media, using packet switching over mobile network via VoLTE.

5G can be implemented in low-band, mid-band or high-band millimeter-wave, with download speeds that can achieve gigabit-per-second (Gbit/s) range, aiming for a network latency of 1 ms.

This near-real-time responsiveness and improved overall data performance are crucial for applications like online gaming, augmented and virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, IoT, and critical communication services.

The Inmarsat system is the oldest, originally developed in 1979 for safety of life at sea, and uses a series of satellites in geostationary orbits to cover the majority of the globe.

In the early 2020s, manufacturers began to integrate satellite connectivity into smartphone devices for use in remote areas, out of the cellular network range.

[63][64][65][66] In 2022, AST SpaceMobile started building a 3GPP standard-based cellular space network to allow existing, unmodified smartphones to connect to satellites in areas with coverage gaps.

Scheduled for launch in 2026, the service provides messaging, emergency communications and IoT for devices like cars, smartphones, tablets and related consumer applications.

[70][71] Before a universal charger standard was agreed upon in the late 2000s, users needed an adapter which was often proprietary by brand or manufacturer to charge their battery.

[77][78] The GSM Association (GSMA) followed suit on 17 February 2009,[79][80][81][82] and on 22 April 2009, this was further endorsed by the CTIA – The Wireless Association,[83] with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announcing on 22 October 2009 that it had also embraced the Universal Charging Solution as its "energy-efficient one-charger-fits-all new mobile phone solution," and added: "Based on the Micro-USB interface, UCS chargers will also include a 4-star or higher efficiency rating—up to three times more energy-efficient than an unrated charger.