Constant Touch Page 3
All countries had monopolies providing landline telephones before the 1980s. Even in the United States, where freedom of commerce and industry was prized, the complex Bell System conglomerate, of which the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) and Bell Laboratories were part, acted like a monopoly. (To give a sense of scale and power, before it was broken up in the 1980s, it was many times the size of today’s Microsoft.) So a common factor in the following stories of how the cellular phone was built in different countries was a context initially dominated by monopolistic, often government-owned, hierarchical telecommunications organisations. Sometimes, these PTTs (Post, Telephone and Telegraph administrations), as they are called, were part of the solution; more often they were the problem.
However, the national stories of how cellular phone systems were assembled are very different. By taking apart my old mobile phone, I’ve found that many material and non-material components are crucial to its working: not only batteries, aerials, chips and LCDs, but also base stations, databases, telephone wire networks, spectrum space and ideas. Bits have come from Finland, Chile, the United States, Germany, Taiwan, Australia and the Congo. But when such components were originally reassembled in the past, to make cellular phone systems in different parts of the world, the resulting systems were very different. The makers of the mobile phone made history, but not in worlds of their own making.
Part two
Different countries, different paths to mobility
Chapter 4
Born in the USA
Our engineers & inventors have harnessed the forces of the earth and skies and the mysteries of nature to make our lives pleasant, swift, safe, and fascinating beyond any previous age. We fly faster, higher, and farther than the birds. On steel rails we rush safely, behind giant horses of metal and fire. Ships large as palaces thrum across our seas. Our roads are alive with self-propelling conveyances so complex the most powerful prince could not have owned one a generation ago; yet in our day there is hardly a man so poor he cannot afford this form of personal mobility.
This message, buried in a time capsule underneath the New York World’s Fair, 1939, was addressed to the human race of the year AD 6939. Putting aside the question of whether the message’s expectation that the people of the seventh millennium would understand ‘princes’, ‘palaces’ and ‘horses’ was realistic, the confident, progressive tone rings clear. But the confidence was forced. Not yet a decade of depression after the great Wall Street crash, and with Roosevelt’s New Deal – and indeed Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia – demonstrating what state action could achieve, the corporations of America were keen to head off criticism, if not revolution, with a spectacular display of how big business was a friend of democracy. Unlike previous fairs, where comparisons between different countries’ cultures had been invited, the 1939 New York World’s Fair presented the vision of the big corporations – General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, AT&T, General Electric, Consolidated Edison – and the vision was not of the painful past, but of a bright future.
The New York World’s Fair, 1939, promised a bright future – so long as big business was left unfettered.
In the ‘Democracity’ of the central Perisphere, Edison’s ‘City of Light’, and particularly in General Motors’ exhibitions ‘City of Tomorrow’ and ‘Futurama’, visitors were given an eagle’s eye view of the clean, prosperous, technologically driven near-future. From the corporate laboratories would spring miracles in our lifetimes. There was a cure for cancer, while ladies of 75 had ‘perfect skin’ and buildings were made of plastic. To the 45 million visitors to the World’s Fair, the future was promised to offer personal mobility, not only in the form of cheap $200 cars, but also through phones without cords.
When you left the Futurama display you were given a badge. On it was a simple statement: ‘I have seen the future.’ This was the message of the New York World’s Fair in a nutshell: while many of the technologies would have been familiar to voracious readers of Astounding, Amazing, and other pulp sci-fi magazines, the Fair made the technological future look imminent. The message of big business was: stick with us through hard times and very soon this future will be yours. So while handheld personal mobile radios had been a fixture in comics and fantasy literature – Dick Tracy, for example, had a wrist-radio, a watch that could talk – the inclusion of radio handsets in the everyday future of the World’s Fair made their reality seem, to Americans, just around the corner.
Indeed, heavy car-bound radio communications had been pioneered in the United States in the 1920s. And, unlike Ericsson’s experimental system, these were true mobile radios: there was no need to stop the car. Like the fictional Dick Tracy, the first users were trying to stop crime. With the production of fast cars and good smooth roads, criminals were getting harder to catch. The result was an arms race between organised crime and the police, each in turn adopting faster cars, more fearsome weapons and, to coordinate action, speedier communication. The Detroit police department was first to try the experiment in 1921. The patrolman, alerted by a message, would have to stop the car and call in by wire. But in 1928, a fully voice-based mobile radio system was introduced in Detroit. Other forces followed.
During the Second World War, radio manufacturers, having cut their teeth on police radio, turned to consider military applications. One such company had been started by Paul V. Galvin in Chicago in 1928. But the name of the company, Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, was soon superseded by that of its chief product, ‘Motorola’ radios, a tag that evokes perfectly the intimate historical relationship between car and mobile radio. One-way Motorola police radios were installed in the 1930s, and the first two-way radio was provided to the police of Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 1940. By then Motorola was gearing up for wartime production. The ‘Handie-Talkie’ two-way radio was developed for the US Army Signal Corps that year, followed two years later by the ‘Walkie-Talkie’. This backpack radio, designed by Daniel E. Noble, worked by frequency rather than amplitude modulation, thereby reducing weight and size while improving performance. Motorola’s 35-pound Walkie-Talkie made mobile radio communication practical in the jungles of west Pacific islands or the farmland of Normandy.
All these American systems were mobile radios but not mobile telephones: you couldn’t use a Walkie-Talkie to speak to someone in a call-box. Part of the reason lay in wartime priorities. The telephone network and radio remained separate until 1945, when the war’s end meant that military production dropped off and new commercial projects could be given the green light. But the separation was also enforced by regulation. The Federal Communications Commission had to be persuaded to drop its opposition before mobile radio telephones could be launched. Nevertheless the FCC granted a licence to AT&T and Southwestern Bell to operate the first basic commercial system, called Mobile Telephone Service, in St Louis, Missouri, beginning in 1946. Soon it spread to 24 other cities.
Demand for car telephones was intense. AT&T launched its ‘highway service’ between New York and Boston in 1947, but in New York itself there were severe problems. Not only was there a waiting list of 2,000 potential customers, but 730 lucky users competed to speak on just twelve radio channels. For two decades radio telephony could barely squeeze onto the radio spectrum. Ironically, the congestion was partly caused by the spectacular growth of private radio. ‘“Mobiling” has become one of the leading activities in ham radio,’ wrote Charles Caringella, call-sign W6NJV, introducing his Amateur Radio Mobile Handbook in 1965. ‘This growth is only natural; more time is being spent in the automobile than ever before – commuting to and from work, as well as weekend and vacation trips.’
There was not enough room on the radio spectrum for private radio and mobile telephony. But in Ring’s concept of the cellular phone, there existed a way out: by reusing radio frequencies in repeating cells, spectrum space could be saved, and more users fitted in. AT&T lobbied the FCC, without success, for a deca
de from 1958 to 1968. Then, at the same time as the civil rights and counter-cultural movements reached a crescendo, there was a reversal of official attitudes. Room was earmarked in the higher end of the radio frequency spectrum for an experiment in cellular telephony, and the radio and electronics industry was invited to respond. Only Bell Laboratories, the research wing of AT&T, replied by the deadline of December 1971. By 1974, the FCC had decided exactly which frequencies the experiment should use; by then Bell had cracked on with the design and construction of equipment, trying it out at the Cellular Test Bed, built near Newark, New Jersey.
In March 1977, the FCC authorised Illinois Bell, the AT&T operating company for Chicago, to install the first cellular phone system. Ten base stations created the cells for an area covering 2,100 square miles around the Windy City. At Chicago’s Oak Park the central switch controlled the base stations and linked the system to the public telephone network. It went live in December 1978. By 1981 2,000 users – the maximum the system could handle – could each speak live from their car to Oak Park via the cellular network and from there, by the fixed wires, to any telephone in the United States. Other manufacturers followed. In 1980, a Motorola subsidiary, American Radio Telephone Service, began delayed trials in Baltimore and Washington. (Martin Cooper of Motorola had filed cellular patents as early as 1973.) In North Carolina, a small cellular company called Millicom adapted a phone made by the E.F. Johnson firm, producing the first portable cellular phone – for those with strong arms.
These early systems convinced the FCC that cellular radio was practical, and should be deployed systematically across the United States. But the sheer scale of the country created problems that would not be encountered, as we shall see, in Europe. It was clearly beyond the resources of any company – except one – to install the base stations, switching centres and marketing operations throughout the United States, from coast to coast, necessary for a national cellular phone system. The one exception was the giant AT&T, the biggest corporation the world had ever seen. But by the early 1980s AT&T was under severe attack from those who would oppose monopolies, leading eventually to the breakup of the Bell System in 1984. Monolithic corporations were not welcome to apply. Moreover, America is made up of an archipelago of cities, with great stretches of rural land in between. The FCC decided it made sense to grant cellular licences by auction on a city-by-city basis, the so-called Metropolitan Statistical Areas (any county with both a total population of more than 100,000 and at least one town with more than 50,000), a format that invited the Bell regional operators – and, after 1 January 1984, the ‘baby Bells’, such as Southwestern Bell, Bell Atlantic, Pacific Telesis (Pactel), Ameritech, Bell South, US West and Nynex – to apply independently. In each area, to encourage competition, two cellular licences were up for grabs. One would typically go to the local Bell, while the other went to a new company. As part of the deal, AT&T set up a subsidiary, kept at arm’s length to satisfy the regulators, called Advanced Mobile Phone Service.
The auction of the 90 largest metropolitan areas provoked hysteria. So many applications had flooded in by the June 1982 deadline that the hasty FCC decided that, after awards for the top 30 cities had been made, the other metropolitan licences would go by lottery. This meant that any chancer could land a ten-year licence, and then hawk it around more competent operators. The story was repeated when licences for the less lucrative remaining metropolitan areas and the Rural Statistical Areas were decided by lottery between 1984 and 1989. The last 180 metropolitan area licences attracted 92,000 applications. The end result was that cellular America was extremely disjointed. Each town or city had a different operator, often very local. New companies such as Chattanooga Cellular Telephone, Fresno Cellular Telephone and Long Beach Cellular Telephone served just their local constituency. Roaming, the ability to use your cellphone in different systems, for example to go from San Francisco to Los Angeles and make calls in both cities, was made extremely difficult.
The disjointed pattern was slowly reversed as the industry consolidated. Firms with licences were bought or merged. By 1992, the largest operator, McCaw, had bought out LIN Broadcasting and 90 other licences, to serve a total population of over 65 million people. Two years later McCaw was bought by AT&T – monopolising forces were creeping back. But by then the FCC’s management of the licensing process had created a distinctive national cellular style, a crazy-paving of licences covering the country, and had done so slowly. As Garry A. Garrard concluded in an analysis of this licensing phase, the United States had ‘spent four years awarding its cellular licences for major markets alone, and seven years in total which, when combined with the initial delay in authorising any cellular service at all, gave other countries the chance to catch up on, and overtake, the technical lead originally provided to the US by AT&T.’
We will see very soon what other countries were doing to overtake the American lead. But first let’s sum up developments so far. Both the concept and first working examples of cellular telephony emerged in the United States, albeit with decades separating the two. The most important factors shaping developments were the existence of the world’s greatest electronics-based company, AT&T, and at the same time hostility to its monopolistic tendencies. The result was innovation, but in a disjointed form, with many small cellular companies rather than one large one. Nor was there a lot of competition, since different companies were restricted to different cities. But there was one standard, called AMPS, after the AT&T subsidiary that gave it its name. This standard dictated how a ‘terminal’ (the mobile) would communicate with the base stations. We will soon see other standards that would compete with AMPS in the wider world.
If there was a distinct pattern of cellular infrastructure in the United States, there was also a distinct pattern of American cellphone use. Unlike in Europe or Japan, the owner of a mobile phone was charged for accepting an incoming call. This made owners reluctant to give away their mobile phone number to all and sundry, and had the effect of making mobile phones a device for business or emergencies only, and not for chat. The relatively sophisticated – and expensive – cellphone also had to compete with pagers and beepers, which were already very popular with Americans. When I stepped off the plane at Baltimore airport in the 1990s the effect, for me, was obvious to see: while in London the mobile was ubiquitous as the prime means of keeping in everyday conversational touch with friends and work contacts alike, on the other side of the Atlantic it was hard to spot a mobile being used, and if it was the call was brief and businesslike. This difference forms the foundation of a quite distinct mobile culture in America compared to Europe or Japan.
Finally, there was also a difference emerging in the material design and styling of American phones. For decades, Motorola had led the way in car phones. In early 1984, the company introduced the first hand-portable cellular phone, the Motorola 8000, although since it weighed only slightly less than a pack of sugar, this black brick-sized device was not easy on the elbow. It was hardly an instant commercial success. Four years later, hand-portables only made up 6 per cent of sales. It is to countries such as Finland and Japan that we must turn to find enthusiasm for well-designed and colourful handsets. Garrard offers an explanation for the slow adoption of hand-portables in the United States: ‘the high price compared to that for car phones, the fact that early cellular networks were not designed for hand-portable use resulting in variable or poor quality reception; and the fact that the entire US way of life revolved around the automobile’. But the Motorola 8000 was also the fulfilment of another corporate promise made five decades previously: the wireless personal telephone that formed part of the gleaming near-future of the New York World’s Fair.
Chapter 5
The Nordic way
American business producing innovative technology is a story of the ‘dog bites man’ variety. It is not news. But within two decades of the launch of cellular telephony in the United States, European bureaucracy had produce
d a technology that more than matched it. As surprising stories go in the history of technology, the success of this European system, GSM, was definitely man biting dog.
While so often an obstacle to political or technological harmony, the diversity of Europe also means that a wide range of different initiatives can be supported. The development of cellular phones in Europe, for example, directly stemmed from the unique characteristics of one European area: the Nordic countries of continental Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden), plus Finland. Only once the cellular idea had been realised in the north did the system spread, for further political reasons, across Europe.
Take Sweden. In the 17th century, Sweden was a great power, dominating Scandinavia, Poland and the Baltic trade into Russia. (Indeed, the ‘Rus’ had been an ancient name given by the Slavs to the colonising Swedish population.) Its style of monarchical government was absolutist (like most of Europe), bureaucratic (like much of Europe), and relatively efficient (unlike much of Europe). This feature, due to the integration of experts of all kinds into the state, survived, even as once-great Sweden declined. Even today experts – such as engineers and academics – can move between university and government with far greater ease than in other countries.
Sweden industrialised late, from the 1870s, without forming massive smoke-stack cities like Manchester in England or Lyon in France. The new industries – pulp, paper, ball bearings, matches (Ivar Krueger, the ‘match king’), explosives (Nobel), weapons (Bofors), steel, telephones (Ericsson) – employed scientific experts but not many other people, compared to, say, cotton mills. Instead, the unemployed rural population upped sticks and emigrated: a quarter of men, women and children left Sweden, mostly bound for the United States. This had several effects. A sympathetic bond was forged across the Atlantic, which helps explains why American trends, for example of efficiency and corporate research, could be adopted back home. Most importantly, however, the declining population made government and the owners of industry very unwilling to upset the labour force, resulting in a distinctive political style: the building of consensus and the rational arbitration of disputes by experts, social democracy and the welfare state. In this society, unlike England or Germany, technology was not generally regarded as a threat – even to jobs – but as something good for everyone. Technology was an equalising force. This aspect of the consensus between industry and individuals was reflected in a passion for industrial design (think IKEA), opinion polls, and apparently democratising but ultimately paternalistic technologies such as radio.