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Mobile Radio Systems

Introduction

The development of the mobile radio system can be divided into two parts: Phase I
produced the earliest systems, and Phase II began after the Federal Communications
Commission's (FCC) classification of what it termed "Domestic Public Land Mobile
Radio Service."

The need to increase public safety was key to the genesis of today's rapidly growing
wireless communications industry. The first use of mobile radio in an automobile
instead of a ship was in 1921. The Detroit Police Department implemented a police
dispatch system using a frequency band near 2 MHz. This service proved so successful
that the allocated channels in the band were soon utilized to the limit. In 1932, the New
York Police Department also implemented the use of the 2-MHz band for mobile
communication.

But the technology to enable mobile communication services for public safety agencies
was not yet available. Early radiotelephone systems could be housed on ships with
reasonable ease but were too large and unwieldy for cars. Also bumpy streets, tall
buildings, and uneven landscapes prevented successful transmission of the
radiotelephone signals on land. The key technological breakthrough came in 1935,
when Edwin Armstrong unveiled his invention, frequency modulation (FM), to improve
radio broadcasting. This technology reduced the required bulk of radio equipment and
improved transmission quality.

In 1934, the FCC allocated four new channels in the 3O- to 4O-MHz band, and by the
early 1940s a significant number of police and public service radio systems had been
developed. By the late 1940s, the FCC made mobile radio available to the private
sector, along with police and fire departments.

Mobile Telephone Service (MTS)

In 1946, Bell Telephone Labs inaugurated the first mobile system for the pubic, in St.
Louis. This system was known as Mobile Telephone Service (MTS). Keep in mind that
at this time AT&T still owned and operated the majority of the public switched
telephone network (PSTN). Three channels in the range of 150 MHz were put into
service, operating at frequencies between 35 and 44 MHz An MTS highway system to
serve the corridor between Boston and New York began operating in 1947. MTS
transmissions (from radio towers) were designed to cover a very large area, using high-
power radio transmitters. Often the towers were placed at geographically high locations.
Because they served a large area, they were subject to noise, interference, and signal
blocking.
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MTS was a half-duplex, "push-to-talk" system; therefore MTS offered communications

that were only one way at a time. An operator was needed to connect a customer to the
landline local exchange carrier (LEC) network.
In 1949 the FCC authorized non-wireline companies known as radio common carriers
(RCCs) to provide MTS. An RCC is a wireless carrier that is not affiliated with a local
telephone company. Prior to 1949, the wireline telephone companies supplied all mobile
service. This marked the birth of competition in the telecommunications industry.

Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS)

In 1965, almost 20 years after the introduction of MTS, the Bell System introduced
Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS), the successor system to MTS. IMTS was
the first automatic mobile system: it was a full-duplex system, eliminating the push-to-
talk requirement of the older MTS system. IMTS allowed simultaneous two-way
conversations. A key IMTS advantage was that users could dial directly into the PSTN
IMTS narrowed the channel bandwidth, which increased the number of frequencies
allowed. Because the cell site locations were high-output-power stations, one radio
location could serve an entire city.

Between the landline phone company and the RCC, nineteen 30-kHz channels were
authorized in the 30- to 300-MHz band, which is the VHF band. The FCC also
authorized twenty-six 25-kHz channels in the 45(~ MHz band (the UHF band). With
full-duplex systems such as IMT~ two radio channels are needed for each conversation:
one channel to transmit and one channel to receive.

As with MTS IMTS radio towers were still installed in high places (ci, tall buildings),
and the system was still designed to cover large geographic areas up to 50 mi in
diameter. Because of limited capacity eventually IMTS operators prohibited roaming in
their markets. Roaming refers to placing calls in markets other than a user's home
market. Roaming will be discussed in a later section.

Trivia: The IMTS system was designed so that only 50% of the calls were completed
during the busy hour. Service was often poorer than that in some metropolitan areas.
This was a result of the fact that very few radio channels existed for IMTS service.

AMPS: The American Cellular Standard

In an effort to use the airwaves more efficiently AT&T engineers decided to stretch the
limited number of radio frequencies available for mobile service by scattering multiple
low-power transmitters throughout a metropolitan area, and "handing off" calls from
transmitter to transmitter as customers moved around in their vehicles.
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This new technique would allow more customers access to the systems simultaneously
and when more capacity was needed, the area served by each transmitter could be
divided again. This was the birth of wireless technology, as we know it today

Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS) is the American analog cellular standard. In
1970, several key developments occurred:

1. The FCC set aside new radio frequencies for land-mobile communications. These
frequencies were UHF television channels in the 800-MHz band that had never been
used.

2. That same year, AT&T proposed to build the first high-capacity cellular telephone
system. it dubbed the system AMPS for Advanced Mobile Phone Service and selected
Chicago as the first test city.

At the inception of the cellular industry the FCC initially granted a total of 666 channels
in each market. At first, AT&T thought it would get national rights to all cellular
frequencies, thereby making AT&T the only national cellular carrier. This would also
have made the cellular industry a monopoly.

Trivia: At that time, AT&T never anticipated the growth potential of the apparently
pent-up demand by the general public for widespread availability of mobile
communication services. They estimated only l million cellular customers would exist
by the end of the century Today, there are over 100 million wireless customers in the
United States alone!

However at that time the FCQ bowing to intense pressure from radio common carriers
(RCCs), determined that the cellular industry should have two carriers per market, and
333 channels were allocated per carrier per market. This marked the birth of the A band
and B band carrier concept. The number of channels was later increased to a total of 832
total cellular channels, 416 channels per carrier per market. This change was brought
about by cellular industry pressure on the FCC to relinquish reserve spectrum to relieve
capacity and congestion problems.

In 1977, while the FCC realized it had to create a regulatory scheme for the new service,
the Commission also decided to authorize construction of two developmental cellular
systems: one in Chicago licensed to Illinois Bell, and a second serving Baltimore and
Washington, D.C., licensed to a non-wireline company: American Radio Telephone
Service (an RCC).
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Once the FCC decided upon the regulatory framework, the first commercial cellular
system began operating in Chicago on October 13, 1983. The very first commercial
cellular telephone call was made at Soldier Field in Chicago to a descendant of
Alexander Graham Bell in West Germany. The second system was activated a short
time later in the Baltimore/Washington, DC., corridor in December 1983. It was these
systems that gave rise to the fastest-growing consumer technology in history an industry
that adds about 28,000 customers per day.

Definition of Cellular Radio

There are two different ways to view the definition of cellular systems:

FCC definition A high-capacity land mobile system in which assigned radio spectrum is
divided into discrete channels which are assigned in groups to geographic cells covering
a cellular geographic service area (CGSA). The discrete channels are capable of being
reused in different cells within the service area, through a process known as frequency
reuse.

Layman's definition A system which uses radio transmission rather than physical
wirelines to provide telephone service comparable to that of regular business or
residential telephone service.

The Cellular Concept

Instead of having just a few radio channels that everyone must share [like MTS, IMTS,
or citizens' band (CB) radio], cellular radio channels are reused simultaneously in
nearby geographic areas, yet customers do not interfere with each other's calls.
The cellular system is similar in functional design to the public switched telephone
network, or landline network; fundamentally it contains subscribers, transmission
systems, and switches. The existence and control of the radio function of the cellular
system is what differentiates cellular from landline telephone service (the PSTN). When
launched in 1983, the cellular radiotelephone system was the culmination of all prior
mobile communication systems.

Cellular System Objectives

When Bell Labs developed the AMPS cellular concept, the major system objectives
were efficient use of radio spectrum and widespread availability. While the cellular
concept had been developed earlier, several critical technologies came together
simultaneously in the late 1970s to propel the cellular industry forward. New
technologies enabled small, relatively lightweight subscriber equipment to be
manufactured cheaply. Vastly improved integrated circuit manufacturing techniques
allowed for major advances in computer technology as well as the miniaturization of
critical equipment elements, especially within portable mobile telephones.
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Figure: Five main components of cellular/Wireless communication systems