Telecommunications Industry View

Telecommunications Industry View
The telecommunications industry has its origins in Alexander Graham Bell’s 1870
invention of the telephone, and this rapidly evolved into the U.S.-wide public telephone
network developed by scientists and engineers working at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Today, of course, the telephone network is massive, serving and connecting
all the developed nations of the world and enabling almost instantaneous voice
communications between any two parties subscribing to telephone service. In the years
immediately following World War II, the United States was rapidly rebuilding the civilian
economy and there was robust demand for new products and services, including, in
the telephone service industry, a demand by some subscribers for a mobile telephone
service affording radio access to the public-switched telephone network (PSTN). Simple
one-way dispatch radio systems had been in use by police departments, taxicab
fleets, and so on, since the 1920s, and the wartime use of Army walkie-talkie radios
was already well known to much of the general public. Consequently, mobile telephone
service, the interconnection of mobile users with the PSTN, was introduced in
1946, when the FCC granted AT&T a license to operate such a service in St. Louis.
In less than a year, mobile telephone service was being offered in more than 25 cities
in the United States. Demand for mobile telephone service grew rapidly over the next
several decades, and finally, in 1975, the FCC allocated spectrum for cellular mobile
telephone service and related mobile wireless services.
The first commercial cellular system in the United States, called Advanced Mobile
Phone Service (AMPS), went into operation in 1983 in Chicago, and the demand for
cellular telephone service grew rapidly, in part stimulated by the growing popularity of
cordless telephones. Later in the 1980s, digital cellular technology was introduced with
the pan-European GSM system and the U.S. TDMA system. Then CDMA cellular technology
was introduced with the IS-95 system. Thus, we see the evolution of successive
cellular system designs as meeting the steadily growing demands of telephone service
subscribers wanting to have mobile access to the PSTN, and the succeeding demands
for greater system capacity and for new features and services, including data services.