Today, it is very common to pick up your mobile and make a phone call, but mobile phone technology is fairly new as it has been developing and moving forward at great speed for the last twenty years. However, the history of the mobile has been moving forward long before 1979 when AT&T starting looking into mobile opportunities. The truth is, the mobile phone actually started development back in 1835 when Samuel Morse first started working with the electric telegraph.
In fact, the path to the mobile phone began on March 10th 1876 in Boston when Alexander Bell made the very first telephone call. After this, the path and the history of the mobile phone began to move forward until 1980 when AT&T in the United States hired a consultant to appraise how well mobile phones would be accepted in society. The consultant group theorized that the world market would top out at 900,000 mobiles in the world market. As of 2003, 900,000 mobile phones are sold every three days across the world, a number that has grown exponentially since then.
The mobile phone market first entered the UK in May of 1983 when Cellnet and Vodafone were given licenses that allowed them to provide cellular radio services across networks in the UK. It took until January 1985 for the two mobile providers to open their doors and originally charged fees that may make your contract look a bit better: £164 for a mobile phone lease each quarter, £100 for installation charges, and £60 for the connection to the network.
The system at that time did not work well, dropped calls were the norm, and at a pound a minute it was not a satisfactory way of communicating, but very slowly things improved, and the big grey phone was replaced by more efficient phones.
In September of 1993 the first GSM network was launched by One 2 One and mobile technology became more popular due to the reliability and dependability of GSM. Soon thereafter in April of 1994 Orange was launched in the UK by Hutchinson Microtel and during the same time period SMS was developed allowing for text messages to be send from mobile user to mobile user.
Over the next ten years many more improvements were made that led mobile cell phones to surge in popularity including a MMC recommendation in 1998 to reduce the price of mobile phone calls, the development of keeping a number even when switching networks in December of 1998 in the UK, and a finding in September 1999 from the Health of Commons Science and Technology Committee that issued mobile phones did not pose a health risk to users.
