Rogue Corner: The cell phone at 40?

April 3rd marked the 40th anniversary of one of the most important inventions of the last half of the 20th century.? On April 3rd, 1973, Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first cell phone call to his rival at Bell Labs using a DynaTAC phone.? In that moment, the world of communications was changed forever.? Although it would be 6 years before the first cell phone network would come on line in the world, the ability to communicate had forever changed.

The basis for the cell phone were mobile radios the US military had used in World War II.? But it would be nearly 3 decades following the war before Motorola would perfect the technology in a device that was a foot long, 2 pounds in weight, and looked like a brick with a battery life of a mere 20 minutes.? As the first US networks came on line in the 1980s, these devices were largely used by traveling salespeople, doctors, Wall Street executives, and mostly governmental leaders.? These first cell phones had dedicated frequencies and used the entire bandwidth provided to transmit an analog signal.? The capacity of the networks were therefore limited, making wireless phone call a premium service.

The first wireless phone call was just the first of three monumental game-changing moments that the cell phone would create.? The second monumental event came in the early 1990s around the time the first digital cell phone standard, known as GSM was created.? As the voice became digitized, the developers realized that more services could be provided.? Using pagers as a guide, GSM developers created a service called short messaging service (or SMS) to provide another means of communicating.? Of course, we know SMS by another name? texting, which today has replaced voice calls as one of the most popular uses of cell phones.? Other services would be added, such as internet, E-Mail, and digital payments.

Making the phone digital also provided increased capacity, helping to lower the cost of making phone calls and maintaining the network.? But something else happened during the construction which really brought the cell phone to the masses.? As the cellular networks were developed, workers from all over the world came to build the GSM and CDMA networks.? As they did so, they learned how to build these networks, they also learned that they could take that knowledge back to their home countries and build cheap wireless networks of their own in places that never even had a wireline network.? As a result, the ratio of people to cell phones in the world today is closing in on a 1:1 ratio, and within the next two years, there will be more mobile devices than people worldwide.? Every country in the world has a digital cell phone network, and very few even have a 1sst generation analog network still in operation (Thailand is one of the few countries that still have an analog network).

The third great moment was the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.? Sure, the iPhone was not the first smartphone (that was the Blackberry).? However, the iPhone made the concept of the smartphone simple for the younger generation to comprehend, and its ease of use revolutionized the smart phone in ways Blackberry could not.? The iPhone and its Android rivals changed the way we used cell phones again, taking full advantage of social media and using the mobile phone in ways Martin Cooper could not even imagine.? Gaming, GPS, and other services have made the cell phone indispensible in our lives.

The phone used to be a home luxury where an entire family was connected with only one phone line.? Now, each family member can have a dedicated phone lines at a cost cheaper than a home phone line with many of the same services and then some.? In the coming years, the dedicated voice channels of cell phones will be replaced by a more IP-centric concept, turning voice into digital data, again reducing the cost of making a phone call.? How else will the cell phone change?? No one knows for sure, not even Martin Cooper himself.

One thing is clear:? the cell phone is unquestionably a game-changing technology.? What will the cell phone look like at 50?? Who knows.

Source: http://roguecorner.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-cell-phone-at-40.html

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