HISTORY OF MOBILE PHONES

                                         

Although most of us feel like we couldn't live without our mobile phones, they've not really been in existence for long. In fact, mobile phones as we know them today have only been around in the last 10 to 15 years.

THE FIRST MOBILE PHONES

Mobile phones particularly the smatrphones that have become our inseperable companions today, are relatively new. However, the origin of the mobile phone goes bakck to 1908 when a US Patent was issued in Kentucky for a wireless telephone.
The story of the modern mobile phone really begins in the 1940s when engineers working at AT&T developed cells for mobile phone based stations.
The very first mobile phones were not really mobilephones at all. They were two- way radios that allowed people like taxi drivers and emergency services to communicate. Instead of relying on base stations with seo=perate cells (and the signal being passed from one cell to another), the first mobile phone netwroks are often referred to as 0G mobile phones, or Zero Generation mobile phones. Most phones roday rely on 3G or third-generation mobile technology.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MOBILE PHONE TECHNOLOGY

A Motorola employee called Martin Cooper is widely considere to be a key player in the history of mobile phones, inventing the first mobile phone that was for practical use. Handsets that could bet used in a vehicle had been developed prior to Martin Cooper's phone, but his was the first usable truly portable mobile telephone. Cooper made mobile phone history in April 1973 when he made the first ever call on a handheld mobile phone



LANDMARK IN MOBILE PHONE HISTORY

• Japan became first country to have a city-wide commercial cellular mobile phone network in 1979
• The Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system launched in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and finland in 1981.
• The next major step in mobile phone history was in the mid eighties with the First Generation (1G) filly automatic cellular networks were introduced.
• The first ever mobile phone to be approved by the FCC ( Federal Communications Commission) in the USA was the Motorola DynaTac in 1983.

MODERN MOBILE PHONES
Mobile telephony developed on lieaps and bounds over the next decade, particularly with the arrival of handover technology. This allowed users to keep their connections as they travelled between base stations- so as a user walked from one mobile phones mast to another, the conversation woul not drop or be interrupted.
The birth of the Second Generation (2G)  mobile phones was in Finland in 1993. It was also the year that the first SMS text messages were sent and that data services began to appear on mobile phones.
Mobiles that we use today are 3g mobiles or third generation mobiles. 3G launched in 2001 and allowed operators to offer a huge range of advanced services such as video calling and HSPA data transmission.
Now the UK market has matured there are several network providers competing for business. These include:

• Three
• O2
• Orange
• Tesco Mobile
• T Mobile
• Virgin Mobile
• Vodafone