On this day (03 Apr), 48 years ago an employee of Motorola called up his rival at AT&T labs to inform (read troll) him about his company developing the first portable phone. While the communication was neither clear nor documented, it marked the advent of a paradigm changing technology that has resulted in the transformation of mobile handsets from 40 kg monsters to under 200 gm beauties.....the history of mobile telephony.
How The Phone Lost Its Wire
1926 First successful mobile telephony service offered to first class passengers on the Deutsche Reichsban (German Railway) between Berlin and Hamburg through radio transmitters.
1946 First calls made on a car radiotelephone in Chicago through equipment weighing 40 kg.
1956 The first automated mobile phone system for private vehicles launched in Sweden.
1969 The Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) Group is established to develop a mobile phone system that focused on accessibility.
1973 Dr Martin Cooper of Motorola communications makes the first public mobile phone call.
The Brick
The first mobile phone was unwieldy and not portable unless you had beefy arms. Owing to these, the Motorola phone was fondly called the brick.
03 Apr 1973
First handheld cellular phone call made by Motorola engineer Martin Cooper.
1.2 kg weight of the phone.
35 minutes talk time.
10 hours to charge.
1982 Engineers and administrators from 11 European countries meet in Stockholm and adopt the Nordic model of cooperation.
1985 Comedian Ernie Wise makes the first mobile phone call in the UK from outside the Dicken's Pub to Vodafone HQ.
1987 Technical specs for the GSM standard are approved.
1992 First SMS is sent in the UK. Neil Papworth sends 'Merry Christmas' message to a director at Vodafone.
31 Jul 1995 India's first mobile call between the then union telecom minister Sukh Ram and erstwhile chief minister of West Bengal Jyoti Basu.
Phones used Nokia.
Network MobileNet : a venture between India's BK Modi Group and Australia's Telstra.
Cost then Rs.8.4 per minute for both outgoing and incoming calls.
Rs.16.8 per minute for peak time calls.
1998 1st downloadable content sold to mobile phones : A ringtone.
1999 Emojis are invented by S Kurita in Japan.
2003 The 3G standard is adopted worldwide, kicking off the age of mobile internet and the rise of smartphones.
2007 The debut of iphone.
2008 First Android phone turns up in the form of the T-Mobile G1.
2009 WhatsApp launched.
2010 Samsung launches its first Galaxy S smartphone.
Know Your Gs
2G Developed in the 1990s, the fight was between two standards : the European GSM and the US' CDMA. These used digital instead of analog transmission. The rise in mobile phone usage as a result of 2G was explosive and this era saw the advent of prepaid mobile phones.
3G With more people jumping on to the mobile phone bandwagon, demand for data surged in the 2000s. The main difference between 3G and 2G is the use of packet switching rather than circuit switching for data transmission. Speed standards were also set.
4G By 2009, it was clear that 3G networks would be overwhelmed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming media. The first two technologies were the WiMAX standard (US) and the LTE standard, offered in Scandinavia.
5G This is the next version of cellular mobile telephone standards. It gives millimetre-band radio spectrum to allow data speeds up to 1 gigabit per second and reduce latency (the processing time to handle a data transmission) between handset and network.
Courtesy. EX File, the NIE.
PS.
Today is also the 107th birth anniversary of Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw.
Tailpiece.
Got up at 6, the chores and was ready by a half past 9. Talked to the IFB washing machine servicing station to send its rep at the earliest along with the spares needed to be replaced but he fetches up only by a quarter past 2.
Participated in the Aazhchakkoottam : "The Scientific Background to Psephology" by Prof (Dr) G Gopakumar, Former VC, Central University, Kasaragod from 1600 to 1730 hrs. A very interesting interaction!
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