Nowadays, there are few areas of the inhabited world that are not hooked up to mobile networks. Mobile phones have become such a ubiquitous part of the fabric of our society that we sometimes forget that, up until relatively recently, there was no such thing as a mobile telecommunications network anywhere in the world. Nowadays, mobile telephone networks are major multinational concerns, with multi-billion euro turnovers and transmitters all over the world. In the 1950s, however, there was only one mobile telecoms network, and you had to make your way to Sweden if you wanted to use it. If you want to make a few calls when you're on the go nowadays, you can get yourself a deal that will give you a free phone, with unlimited calls and texts, as part of an affordable monthly payment plan. Back then, you had to be pretty well heeled in order to be able to afford to make just one call on a mobile phone!



A fully automated mobile phone network for civilians, called the Altay system, was established in Moscow in nineteen sixty three. By the 1970s, coverage had been expanded to incorporate over 30 cities in the USSR, and is still in use in some areas as a trunking system. A pocket automated mobile phone network, going by the name of RAT, was established in Bulgaria in 1966, and could serve up to six customers per base station.

One of the main problems with mobile phone technology in the early days was the fact that transmission was lost and not automatically regained when you went between one transmission zone to another. This problem was rectified by an engineer at Bell Labs in the US, who invented an automatic ?call handoff? system in nineteen seventy. The following year, the American telecommunications giant AT&T submitted a proposal for a cellular mobile telecommunications network called the Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS), to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). After years of hearings, the network was given the go ahead in 1982, and the AMPS network was allocated frequencies between 824 and 894 MHz. The AMPs network was upgraded from the old analogue technology in 1990 and is still in use today in upgraded form.

One of the first properly successful commercial mobile phone networks to be available to the general public, called ARP, was set up in Finland in nineteen seventy one. ARP is sometimes referred to as being a zero generation (0G) cellular network, in that the technology was more advanced than early systems such as MTB or RAT, but not as advanced as the systems that were to follow, such as AMPS, which many people consider to be examples of the first generation of mobile phone technology as we now know it.