{"id":34,"date":"2007-06-12T21:29:46","date_gmt":"2007-06-13T05:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=34"},"modified":"2007-06-12T21:29:46","modified_gmt":"2007-06-13T05:29:46","slug":"the-first-mobile-phones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=34","title":{"rendered":"The first mobile phones"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I read an <a href=\"http:\/\/doi.acm.org\/10.1145\/1247001.1247003\">article<\/a> today that talked about the evolution of wireless access, starting from its humble beginnings with something called &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Improved_Mobile_Telephone_Service\">Improved Mobile Telecommunications Service<\/a>&#8221; (IMTS) in the late 70&#8217;s and early 80&#8217;s.  Initially, mobile phone communications were conducted over 32 frequencies with no sharing &#8212; meaning that a single base station could service a maximum of 32 simultaneous calls (although most did not support all of those frequencies; supporting 11-13 was more common).  The advance obtained by &#8220;cellular&#8221; phones was to break coverage areas into smaller &#8220;cells&#8221;, so that each base station serviced a smaller area (and presumably, fewer callers).  Further advances were obtained with protocol improvements (like CDMA and TDMA) that permit multiple phones to share the same frequency.<\/p>\n<p>But getting back to these first mobile phones, there were some other limitations.  For example, calls were still dialed with a <i>rotary<\/i> dial.  The phones themselves cost $2000-4000 (no mail-in rebates!), required a 12x12x6-inch transceiver box and a 19&#8243; antenna, and drew so much power that they sometimes drained the car battery if used for prolonged times.  And even for those willing to accept these terms, there was a 2-3 year waiting list (again due to the small number of simultaneous callers that could be supported).  <\/p>\n<p>My, how times have changed!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I read an article today that talked about the evolution of wireless access, starting from its humble beginnings with something called &#8220;Improved Mobile Telecommunications Service&#8221; (IMTS) in the late 70&#8217;s and early 80&#8217;s. Initially, mobile phone communications were conducted over 32 frequencies with no sharing &#8212; meaning that a single base station could service a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}