In 1946, the first public mobile telephone service was introduced in twenty-five major American cities. Each system used a single, high-powered transmitter and large tower in order to cover distances of over 50 km in a particular market.

The early FM push-to-talk telephone systems of the late 1940s used 120 kHz of RF bandwidth in a half-duplex mode (only one person on the telephone call could talk at a time), even though the actual telephone-grade speech occupies only 3 kHz of baseband spectrum.

The large RF bandwidth was used because of the difficulty in mass-producing tight RF filters and low-noise, front-end receiver amplifiers. In 1950, the FCC doubled the number of mobile telephone channels per market, but with no new spectrum allocation. Improved technology enabled the channel bandwidth to be cut in half to 60 kHz.

By the mid 1960s, the FM bandwidth of voice transmissions was cut to 30 kHz. Thus, there was only a factor of four increase in spectrum efficiency due to technology advances from WWII to the mid 1960s. Also in the 1950s and 1960s, automatic channel trunking was introduced and implemented under the label IMTS (Improved Mobile Telephone Service).

With IMTS, telephone companies began offering full duplex, auto-dial, auto-trunking phone systems. However, IMTS quickly became saturated in major markets. By 1976, the Bell Mobile Phone service for the New York City market (a market of about 10,000,000 people at the time) had only twelve channels and could serve only 543 paying customers. There was a waiting list of over 3,700 people, and service was poor due to call blocking and usage over the few channels. IMTS is still in use in the U.S., but is very spectrally inefficient when compared to today’s U.S. cellular system.

During the 1950s and 1960s, AT&T Bell Laboratories and other telecommunications companies throughout the world developed the theory and techniques of cellular radio-telephony the concept of breaking a coverage zone (market) into small cells, each of which reuse portions of the spectrum to increase spectrum usage at the expense of greater system infrastructure.

The basic idea of cellular radio spectrum allocation is similar to that used by the FCC when it allocates television stations or radio stations with different channels in a region of the country, and then reallocates those same channels to different stations in a completely different part of the country.

Channels are only reused when there is sufficient distance between the transmitters to prevent interference. However, cellular telephony relies on reusing the same channels within the same market or service area. AT&T proposed the concept of a cellular mobile system to the FCC in 1968, although technology was not available to implement cellular telephony until the late 1970s.

In 1983, the FCC finally allocated 666 duplex channels (40 MHz of spectrum in the 800 MHz band, each channel having a one-way bandwidth of 30 kHz for a total spectrum occupancy of 60 kHz for each duplex channel) for the U.S. Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS).

According to FCC rules, each city (called a market) was only allowed to have two cellular radio system providers, thus providing a duopoly within each market which would assure some level of competition. AMPS was the first U.S. cellular telephone system, and was deployed in late 1983 by Ameritech in Chicago, IL. In 1989, the FCC granted an additional 166 channels (10 MHz) to U.S. cellular service providers to accommodate the rapid growth and demand.

In late 1991, the first US Digital Cellular (USDC) system hardware was installed in major U.S. cities. The USDC standard (Electronic Industry Association Interim Standard IS-54 and later IS136) allowed cellular operators to replace gracefully some single-user analog channels with digital channels which support three users in the same 30 kHz bandwidth.

In this way, U.S. carriers gradually phased out AMPS as more users accepted digital phones. The capacity improvement offered by USDC is three times that of AMPS, because digital modulation (π/4 differential quadrature phase shift keying), speech coding, and time division multiple access (TDMA) are used in place of analog FM and FDMA.

Given the rate of digital signal processing advancements, speech coding technology will increase the capacity to six users per channel in the same 30 kHz bandwidth within a few years, although.

A cellular system based on code division multiple access (CDMA) has been developed by Qualcomm, Inc. and standardized by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) as an Interim Standard (IS-95).

This system supports a variable number of users in 1.25 MHz wide channels using direct sequence spread spectrum. While the analog AMPS system requires that the signal be at least 18 dB above the co-channel interference to provide acceptable call quality, CDMA systems can operate at much larger interference levels because of their inherent interference resistance properties.

The ability of CDMA to operate with a much smaller signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) than conventional narrowband FM techniques allows CDMA systems to use the same set of frequencies in every cell, which provides a large improvement in capacity..

Unlike other digital cellular systems, the Qualcomm system uses a variable rate vocoder with voice activity detection which considerably reduces the required data rate and also the battery drain by the mobile transmitter.

In the early 1990s, a new specialized mobile radio service (SMR) was developed to compete with U.S. cellular radio carriers.

By purchasing small groups of radio system licenses from a large number of independent private radio service providers throughout the country, Nextel and Motorola formed an extended SMR (E-SMR) network in the 800 MHz band that provides capacity and services similar to cellular.

Using Motorola’s integrated radio system (MIRS), SMR integrates voice dispatch, cellular phone service, messaging, and data transmission capabilities on the same network. In 1995, Motorola replaced MIRS with the integrated digital enhanced network (iDen).

Personal Communication Service (PCS) licenses in the 1800/1900 MHz band were auctioned by the U.S. Government to wireless providers in early 1995, and these have spawned new wireless services that complement, as well as compete with, cellular and SMR.

One of the stipulations of the PCS license was that a majority of the coverage area be operational before the year 2000. Each PCS licensee was able to “build-out” each market well in advance of this deadline. As many as five PCS licenses are allocated for each major U.S. city.