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We Could Have Had Cellphones Four Decades Earlier (reason.com)
_Sharp'r_ writes: Professor Thomas Hazlett of Clemson University analyzed the history of wireless spectrum and concluded the technology was known and available for cellphones in the 40s, but there was no spectrum available. Based on assumptions cellphones would always be luxury goods without mass appeal, significant spectrum for divisible cellular networks wasn't legally usable until the early 80s. Instead, the unused spectrum was reserved for the future expansion of broadcast TV to channels 70-83. Here's an excerpt from the report: "When AT&T wanted to start developing cellular in 1947, the FCC rejected the idea, believing that spectrum could be best used by other services that were not 'in the nature of convenience or luxury.' This view -- that this would be a niche service for a tiny user base -- persisted well into the 1980s. 'Land mobile,' the generic category that covered cellular, was far down on the FCC's list of priorities. In 1949, it was assigned just 4.7 percent of the spectrum in the relevant range. Broadcast TV was allotted 59.2 percent, and government uses got one-quarter."
Without modern miniaturization, spread-spectrum, and modern data compression, it would have been for an elite. We are lucky it wasn't rolled out in the 40's because it would have been a nickel-plated vacuum tube thing, and allocated to high-payers before the technology to allocate it widely existed.
Many kinds of technology were involved into making the cell phone - from hardware to software - and most were simply not matured enough during the 1940's
The were called "radio phones/car phones". They were in use since the late 1940's and were quite popular in the 60s, 70s, and through the early 80s and often found in Limousines etc, before cell phones.
This author does not really know what they are talking about.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
...and so were cellular telephones when they first came to market. All that you needed was a scanner.
It was so easy to listen to any cell phone conversation, that website operators even setup websites allowing anyone to listen to live cell phone conversation streams in various cities.
https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-actions-and-decisions/investigations/investigations-into-businesses/incidents/2001/cf-dc_010917/
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
We could all be using satellite phones now...but they're not commercially viable...capability does not equal widely applicable. Especially technological capacity in its infancy. We could theoretically all be travelling in electromagnetic floating cars...but we're not...it's technically feasible...but not practical or commercially viable at this point in time...so...even though Tesla demonstrated wireless electricity in the 1800's...we're just now coming into induction charging as a regular thing. We're still not powering every device in our house through one central electrical generator...it's all being worked on though folks...you just can't get it cheap now...
regular nmt was shit easy to listen to and the carphones that came before were even easier - and those had an operator patch/dial your call. cops could ask their operators to patch them through. does that make cop radios cellphones? no.
and yes, I vote bullshit on the article. sure we had radios. we didn't have the automation to handle traffic and connecting the calls and THOSE are largely what counts as a cellphone vs. a radio.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Even the simplest bare-minimum function (making calls) would require a system the size of a house. In the early 40's, it was virtually impossible to reliably build anything that ran above about 50 mhz in mass-production, forget *890* mhz. There were AM "apex" broadcasts in the 50 mhz range, and early FM was around there, too, because that was the best they could do.
Even in the mid 50's the "new" FM band at 100-ish mhz was very marginal to even build into a receiver, and there was *never* a portable tube FM radio (forget the transmitter part). The first portable FM radio in wide release wasn't available until 1961 (Zenith Royal 2000 - still the best performer), and it used transistors, weighed about two pounds, and was the size of a large lunchbox/small briefcase. And that, again, was just the receiver.
Essentially, cellphones weren't practically realizable until large-scale integration came along in the 70's, and available spectrum had nothing to do with it.
Particularly since cellphones as they actually were/are, meaning phones that work with individuals radio "cells" and move between them need computers to work. They don't have to be amazing computers, but they need some computer logic to handle dealing with dynamic frequency assignment and handoff between towers.
That one piece of a technology, even an important piece, existed at a given time doesn't mean the tech could happen. Many devices require a confluence of a number of technologies before they can happen.
Smartphones are an example. They aren't particularly a novel idea, we've seen shit like them in sci fi for a long time. However to actually be a thing on the market we needed a lot of shit:
--Processors had to get fast enough at a small enough size
--Displays had to get small, light, and low energy
--Batteries had to get sufficient energy density
--Silicon based storage had to evolve to usable levels
--We needed wireless digital communication
--We needed the Internet (or something like it to have something worth connection to)
Without any one of those things, you don't have a workable smartphone. That they started to rise to prominence when they did isn't some amazing stroke of genius or luck, it was because the various technologies had reached the needed point.
"Cellular" means using low powered transmitters at a high frequency and something like frequency modulation, which has a "capture effect" to create small geographic zones of reception. This enables more conversations to take place over less frequencies, particularly in built-up areas. As you move from one "cell" to another you hook up with a different base station. Not quite what radio hams were doing. If you turn up on a frequency they are already using with some new-fangled FM signal they would probably tell you to QSY or QRP in no uncertain terms.
Cell phones used analog transmissions as late as 2008. How do I know this? Because that was when my cell provider bought me a new phone so they could retire all their analog equipment. I had a "dual mode" phone then that could do digital and analog. The FCC would not allow the cell providers to get rid of their analog equipment until enough of their subscribers had digital phones. I hung on to that phone so long that not only did I get a free phone but I was paid $50 to take the free phone.
Another thing that prompted the switch were instances of high up government officials having their phone calls listened to by people with scanners.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The Romans had all the technology to make guns. But they didn't, because they lacked the requisite mindset to make black powder and bronze gun barrels.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Yeah, right. With valves. You'd need some kind of cart just for the batteries.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The summary reads like: if we had known the future, we could have done something differently.
I think you could make the claim about a trillion other decisions made throughout history.
First handheld cell phone from Motorola in 1973 was quite big, and they said it was a huge research and manufacturing effort to squeeze components down to that size with 70s technology.
The article tells us that the first "cellular" call (the author's opinion seems to be that this was the only contributory technology required to make "cellphones" as we know them today) was made in 1973. So 4 decades earlier would have meant starting celular technology in the early 1930's.
But to claim we could have had "cellphones" at any particular point in time implies all the infrastructure that goes with them: small size, portability, low cost, cell-towers, call routing computers, high capacity batteries. Simply saying that technical feasibility is the same as being able to develop a commercial product is naive.
The ancient Babylonians used oil, does that mean thay should have developed the internal combustion engine?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It was certainly possible to modulate analog signals on today's cellular frequencies by the late 40's and early 50's (at least the lower SHF frequencies,) but it required several stages of tuned circuits; lots of hot, fragile, temperamental tubes. Without precision VFOs and digital control there is no frequency agility, so you manually tuned everything. Filtering was laughably bad by today's standards, so the sort of narrow band operation we rely on today was not feasible. Digital would be right out for at least two decades and fabulously expensive even then, and good ADC/DACs simply didn't exist. Without that stuff there is no cost effective way to implement time division multiplexing in an robust manner... So the best you might have done is a large, costly, fragile analog "phone" stepping on/crosstalking with others on some sort of duplexed repeater system, I guess.
The premise of the story is BS. The FCC was not the reason there were no iphones in 1955. Just more clickbait.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Just some back of the napkin calculations: So with 44 chanels (4.7% of the spectrum) they could host 575 callers. If they had the 59.7% of the spectrum allocated to TV, they could have hosted around 650 channels, which, by extension would support about 8000 callers. In New York City, a city with more than 7 million people in 1940. So, no, we couldn't have had everyone using cell phones in the 1940's even without FCC meddling. *AT BEST* it would have increased the cellphone user base from 0.01% of the population to 0.11% of the population. Without the geographic cells and spectrum switching tech that AT&T brought about in the 1980s, cell phones would have remained toys of the very wealthy and lucky.
> This means a potentially unlimited number of people can be watchin
The number is large, but not unlimited. Enough TV receivers, and the effects of their antennas and even their bodies on the radio passing through them, would tend to block out the signal further away. But the effect is modest and it would take a quite large number of antennas to achieve something like a Faraday cage to block the transmission completely.
Deep pocketed people
Literally
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
...and so were cellular telephones when they first came to market. All that you needed was a scanner.
In fact, it was perfectly legal under the Communications Act of 1934 to listen to - but not repeat - communications received in any mode on any frequency.
Then Reagan Got The Government Off The Backs Of The People and signed a law that made it not merely illegal to receive cellular communications, but to sell radios capable of receiving cellular communications. Land of the Free.
Not that it did much good. Cellphones of the day tended to leak over onto my police-band radio anyway. And technically whoever blew up Newt Gringrich's reign by publishing a cell call intercepted in Gainesville, Florida should have been prosecuted, but no one was.
These days, however, more communications than not are both digitized and encrypted. That includes the public-service stuff like fire departments, public transportation, routine police work and a lot more. You can no longer hear what you're paying for or how your local/state government does its day-to-day work.
My guess is because because in the 1940's Europe was a real fucking mess.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire