Nowadays it is increasingly difficult to imagine our life without a mobile phone. And if earlier its presence was an indicator of financial viability and prestige, now a cell phone can be found in almost any person. It has become so firmly embedded in our everyday life that it seems to have existed for an eternity. However, only a little more than fifty years have passed since the creation of the first mobile phone. <<The very idea of cellular telephone communication appeared at AT&T Bell Labs back in 1946. Then this company created the world’s first radiotelephone service: it was a hybrid of a telephone and a radio transmitter. With the help of a radio station installed in the car, it was possible to transmit a signal to the PBX and make a regular phone call. The call to the radiotelephone was made in a much more complicated way: the subscriber had to call the telephone exchange and tell the phone number installed in the car. It was impossible to speak at the same time: communication took place as in ordinary radio stations of that time – in order to speak, you had to press a button and release it to hear a reply message. The capabilities of radiotelephones were limited: interference and a small radio station range interfered.

Until the early 1960s, many companies refused to conduct research in the field of cellular communication, because they came to the conclusion that, in principle, it was impossible to create a compact cellular telephone.

Then, for about ten years, AT&T Bell Labs and Motorola conducted research in parallel. However, Motorola managed to achieve success faster. The company’s engineer Martin Cooper realized that he could create a relatively small cell phone. It took 15 years and a huge sum of $100 million to develop it. The first tests were scheduled for April 3, 1973. By that day, the first base station was installed on top of the 50-storey Alliance Capital Building in New York. The first prototype of the BS could serve no more than 30 subscribers and connected them to land lines.

The cell phone itself was called Dyna-Tac.

It was a tube weighing about 1.15 kg and measuring 22.5×12.5×3.75 cm. There were 12 keys on the front panel, 10 of them digital and two for sending a call and ending a conversation. No display, no additional functions. The battery allowed you to communicate via Dyna-Tac for as long as 35 minutes, but you had to charge it for more than 10 hours. It was this phone that M. Cooper picked up on the morning of April 3 and dialed Joel Engel’s number. Undoubtedly, it was a triumph – for both Cooper and Motorola. After finishing the conversation and holding a press conference in the same building, engineers and developers realized that they had made a revolution in the world of communications. It was the first call made from a cell phone and, in fact, it became the beginning of a new era in the field of telecommunications.

However, the first commercial cell phone appeared on the market only ten years later, on March 6, 1983. It weighed much less than the prototype, only half a kilo, and was sold for three and a half thousand dollars.

Motorola was the first to launch mass production of mobile phones and for a long time became a trendsetter in the world of wireless telephony. The success of cell phones has been overwhelming. Telephone companies could not provide telephones to everyone, because their capabilities were limited by an insufficient number of frequencies, PBX capacities and an insufficient number of cellular transmitters.

However, already in 1983 there were 1 million subscribers in the world, in 1990 – 11 million. The spread of cellular technologies has made this service increasingly cheaper, high-quality and affordable. As a result, according to the International Telecommunication Union, in 1995 there were already 90.7 million cell phone owners in the world, over the next six years their number increased more than 10 times – to 956.4 million. As of September 2003, there were 1.29 billion tube users in the world. It is assumed that by 2007 their number will almost double and exceed 2.15 billion.>>

If we consider that cellular communication originated far from Russia, then the way to us was long. However, regardless of this, the share of mobile users in our country is steadily growing.