Mobile Phones

A mobile phone, known as a cell phone in North America, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while the user is moving within a telephone service area. The radio frequency link establishes a connection to the switching systems of a mobile phone operator, which provides access to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Modern mobile telephone services use a cellular network architecture, and, therefore, mobile telephones are called cellular telephones or cell phones, in North America. In addition to telephony, 2000s-era mobile phones support a variety of other services, such as text messaging, MMS, email, Internet access, short-range wireless communications (infrared, Bluetooth), business applications, video games, and digital photography. Mobile phones offering only those capabilities are known as feature phones; mobile phones which offer greatly advanced computing capabilities are referred to as smartphones.

The first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell[1][2] and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing c. 2 kilograms (4.4 lbs).[3] In 1979, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) launched the world’s first cellular network in Japan.[4] In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone. From 1983 to 2014, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to over seven billion, penetrating virtually 100% of the global population and reaching even the bottom of the economic pyramid.[5] In first quarter of 2016, the top smartphone developers worldwide were Samsung, Apple, and Huawei (and “[s]martphone sales represented 78 percent of total mobile phone sales”).[6] For feature phones (or “dumbphones”) as of 2016, the largest were Samsung, Nokia, and Alcatel.

Mobile phones communicate with cell towers that are placed to give coverage across a telephone service area which is divided up into ‘cells’. Each cell uses a different set of frequencies from neighbouring cells, and will typically be covered by 3 towers placed at different locations. The cell towers are usually interconnected to each other and the phone network and the internet by wired connections. Due to bandwidth limitations each cell will have a maximum number of cell phones it can handle at once. The cells are therefore sized depending on the expected usage density, and may be much smaller in cities. In that case much lower transmitter powers are used to avoid broadcasting beyond the cell.