History of Cellular Mobile Radio and GSM

The idea of cell-based mobile radio systems appeared at Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s. However, the commercial introduction of cellular systems did not occur until the 1980s. Because of the pent-up demand and newness, analog cellular telephone systems grew rapidly in Europe and North America. Today, cellular systems still represent one of the fastest growing telecommunications services. Recent studies indicate that three of four new phones are mobile phones. Unfortunately, when cellular systems were first being deployed, each country developed its own system, which was problematic because

• The equipment only worked within the boundaries of each country.

• The market for mobile equipment manufacturers was limited by the operating system.

Three different services had emerged in the world at the time. They were

• Advanced Mobile Phone Services (AMPS) in North America

• Total Access Communications System (TACS) in the United Kingdom

• Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) in Nordic countries

To solve this problem, in 1982, the Conference of European Posts and Telecommunications (CEPT) formed the Groupe Sp cial Mobile (GSM) to develop a pan-European mobile cellular radio system (the acronym later became Global System for Mobile communications). The goal of the GSM study group was to standardize systems to provide

• Improved spectrum efficiency

• International roaming

• Low-cost mobile sets and base stations (BSs)

• High-quality speech

• Compatibility with Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and other telephone company services

• Support for new services

The existing cellular systems were developed on analog technology. However,...