Farley: “Mobile telephone history”
Like many of our articles before this one, Farley begins detailing the history of the mobile telephone in order to establish an evolutionary context. He discusses it from the early stages of its life cycle, where at the time it had only existed in the newspapers. AT&T and Southwestern Bell were the two premiere phone companies responsible for pushing the technology out the door. The first breakthrough came in 1947 when Bell Laboratories’ “D.H. Ring, with help from W.R Young, articulated a true cellular radio system for mobile telephony in an internal company memorandum” (Farley 23). In the late 1960’s, Farley continues on describing Southwestern Bell’s research & development zeal in designing the first commercial cellular radio system. Motorola joined the fray in the early 70’s to compete with Bell in the hardware market, establishing a rivalry between the two. With the introduction of Intel’s microprocessors, this allowed for even further development of the technology. Farley describes how in 1978 we saw the development of the analog cellular system, which “proved a large cellular system could work” (Farley 27). This would be important later on in the development of different types of cellular networks, like the digital cellular network that came into play in the early 90’s.
For a long time there has always been a distinction between telephone networks and the internet. But now with Web 2.0 esque applications like Skype where you can call people over the internet, you see more of a blend between the two. Apple’s iPhone uses a 3G wireless network in order to access web content, however it still uses a traditional digital cellular network (in this case, AT&T’s). In terms of the future, all signs point towards 3G and its future iterations as the way of the future in terms of mobile communication. The infrastructure and speed is already there, but how does this affect the phone companies that are so invested in the aforementioned cellular networks? A quick browse of the biggest network’s websites (AT&T, Verizon, etc) tells me there’s no need to be worried, because each respective company offers high speed internet. I can only take that as a sign that those running these companies understand the future of mobile telecommunication, and it’s with the internet. I think the barrier to entry at this point is probably cost, but as it always goes with technology – it’ll be cheap one day.