Mobile radio telephone systems were telephone systems of a wireless type that preceded the modern

cellular mobile A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while ...

form of telephony technology. Since they were the predecessors of the first generation of cellular telephones, these systems are sometimes retroactively referred to as pre-cellular (or sometimes zero generation, that is, 0G) systems. Technologies used in pre-cellular systems included the Push to Talk (PTT or manual), Mobile Telephone Service (MTS), Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS), and

Advanced Mobile Telephone System The Advanced Mobile Telephone System (not to be confused with Advanced Mobile Phone System) was a Zero Generation (0G) method of radio communication, launched in 1965 in Japan and mainly was used in Japanese portable radio systems in the 1960s an ...

(AMTS) systems. These early mobile telephone systems can be distinguished from earlier closed

radiotelephone A radiotelephone (or radiophone), abbreviated RT, is a radio communication system for conducting a conversation; radiotelephony means telephony by radio. It is in contrast to '' radiotelegraphy'', which is radio transmission of telegrams (mes ...

systems in that they were available as a commercial service that was part of the

public switched telephone network The public switched telephone network (PSTN) provides Communications infrastructure, infrastructure and services for public Telecommunications, telecommunication. The PSTN is the aggregate of the world's circuit-switched telephone networks that ...

, with their own telephone numbers, rather than part of a closed network such as a police radio or

taxi dispatching A taxi, also known as a taxicab or simply a cab, is a type of vehicle for hire with a driver, used by a single passenger or small group of passengers, often for a non-shared ride. A taxicab conveys passengers between locations of their choice ...

system. These mobile telephones were usually mounted in cars or trucks (thus called '' car phones''), although portable briefcase models were also made. Typically, the transceiver (transmitter-receiver) was mounted in the vehicle trunk and attached to the "head" (dial, display, and handset) mounted near the driver seat. They were sold through WCCs (Wireline Common Carriers, a.k.a. telephone companies), RCCs (Radio Common Carriers), and two-way radio dealers.

Origins

Early examples for this technology: * Motorola, in conjunction with the

Bell System The Bell System was a system of telecommunication companies, led by the Bell Telephone Company and later by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), that dominated the telephone services industry in North America for over one hundr ...

, operated the first commercial mobile telephone service ( MTS) in the US in 1946, as a service of the wireline telephone company. *The A-Netz launched 1952 in West Germany as the country's first public commercial mobile phone network. * System 1 launch in 1959 in the United Kingdom, the 'Post Office South Lancashire Radiophone Service', covering South Lancashire and operated from a telephone exchange in Manchester is cited as the country's first mobile phone network. However it was manual (needed to be connected via an operator) and with very little coverage for several decades. *First automatic system was the Bell System's IMTS which became available in 1964, offering automatic dialing to and from the mobile. *" Altai" mobile telephone system was launched into the experimental service in 1963 in the Soviet Union, becoming fully operational in 1965, a first automatic mobile phone system in Europe. * Televerket opened its first manual mobile telephone system in Norway in 1966. Norway was later the first country in Europe to get an automatic mobile telephone system. *The

Autoradiopuhelin ARP (Autoradiopuhelin, "car radio phone") was the first commercially operated public mobile phone network in Finland. The technology is zero-generation ( 0G), since although it had cells, moving between them was not seamless. The network was propo ...

(ARP) launched in 1971 in Finland as the country's first public commercial mobile phone network *The Automatizovaný městský radiotelefon (AMR) launched in 1978, fully operational in 1983, in Czechoslovakia as the first analog mobile radio telephone in the whole

Eastern Bloc The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc and the Soviet Bloc, was the group of socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America under the influence of the Soviet Union that existed du ...

*The

B-Netz B-Netz was an analog, commercial mobile radio telephone network that was operated by the Deutsche Bundespost in Germany (at first only West Germany) from 1972 until 1994. The system was also implemented in neighboring countries Austria, The Nether ...

launched 1972 in West Germany as the country's second public commercial mobile phone network (albeit the first one that did not require human operators to connect calls)

Radio Common Carrier

Parallel to Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS) in the US until the rollout of cellular AMPS systems, a competing mobile telephone technology was called Radio Common Carrier (RCC). The service was provided from the 1960s until the 1980s when cellular AMPS systems made RCC equipment obsolete. These systems operated in a regulated environment in competition with the Bell System's MTS and IMTS. RCCs handled telephone calls and were operated by private companies and individuals. Some systems were designed to allow customers of adjacent RCCs to use their facilities but the universe of RCCs did not comply with any single interoperable technical standard (a capability called ''roaming'' in modern systems). For example, the phone of an Omaha, Nebraska-based RCC service would not be likely to work in Phoenix, Arizona. At the end of RCC's existence, industry associations were working on a technical standard that would potentially have allowed roaming, and some mobile users had multiple decoders to enable operation with more than one of the common signaling formats (600/1500, 2805, and Reach). Manual operation was often a fallback for RCC roamers. Roaming was not encouraged, in part because there was no centralized industry billing database for RCCs. Signaling formats were not standardized. For example, some systems used two-tone sequential paging to alert a mobile or handheld that a wired phone was trying to call them. Other systems used DTMF. Some used a system called ''Secode 2805'' which transmitted an interrupted 2805 Hz tone (in a manner similar to IMTS signaling) to alert mobiles of an offered call. Some radio equipment used with RCC systems was half-duplex, push-to-talk equipment such as Motorola hand-helds or RCA 700-series conventional two-way radios. Other vehicular equipment had telephone handsets, rotary or push-button dialing, and operated full duplex like a conventional wired telephone. A few users had full-duplex briefcase telephones (which were radically advanced for their day). RCCs used paired UHF 454/459 MHz and VHF 152/158 MHz frequencies near those used by IMTS.

References

External links

Mobile Phone History

Evolution of Mobile Wireless Technology from 0G to 5G
{{Telecommunications *

Radio telephone Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmit ...

Origins

Radio Common Carrier

See also

References

External links