Timeline Of Cell Phones

If you wondered how mobile phones appeared, you should know that everything began with the mobile rigs or the very early two-way radios. They were used in taxicabs, police cruisers, and ambulances but they could not actually be called mobile phones due to normal lacking connectivity to a telephone network and to the absent possibility of dialing phone numbers from the vehicles. This happened mainly before World War II and it became characteristic for a certain community of mobile radio users, also known as mobileers. Due to these users, the technology used grew quite popular and the result was the development of a genuine mobile phone technology. In the beginning, mobile two-way radios were permanently installed in vehicles but with time new versions emerged, such as the so-called transportables or bag phones, equipped with a cigarette lighter plug and easier to carry. These devices could be used as mobile or portable two-ways radios.

The Radio-telephony technology was first used in Europe in 1926, on the first class-passenger trains traveling between Berlin and Hamburg and later  on passenger airplanes and for air traffic security. During the second World War the technology has been popularized and used on a large scale in German tanks. In 1957, a Soviet radio engineer named Leonid Kupriyanovich created the portable mobile phone, named after himself LK-1 or the radiophone but during the 1950s other pioneering experiments started to appear, eventually applying for a number of usable services in the society, commercially and culturally.



The first fully automatic cellular system, considered the first generation mobile phone using an analogue network (1G) was the Nordic Mobile Phone or NMT, launched simultaneously in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden in 1981, and by 1990s we could talk about the second generation (2G) of mobile phone systems, primarily using the GSM standard. The difference between the 2Gs and the previous generation  was in the use of digital transmission instead of the analogue one and also by introducing advanced, fast phone-to-phone signaling. With the second generation a new communication method was available, as SMS text messaging became available on GSM networks and then on all digital networks. The first machine-generated SMS message was sent in the UK in 1991. With 2G media content also became available on mobile phones with the possibility to download ringtones as a paid option.


With the next generation or the 3G a new technology distinguished. The difference between 3G and 2G was the use of packet-switching instead of circuit-switching for data transmission. The new technology has been standardized in the IMT-2000 standardization processing, and  interestingly the procedure has not been actually applied to the existing technologies but to a set of requirements (2Mbit/s maximum date rate indoors and 384 Kbit/s outdoors).



The latest generation, 4G brought a technological advancement that firmly separates it from its predecessor, the use of all-IP Networks instead of circuit switching technology. This generation of mobile phones delivers and receives calls over Internet, LAN, or WAN networks using VoIP technology instead of the traditional circuit switching method.