Chapter 16: Terrestrial Wireless Services

Chapter 17: Satellite Wireless Services

Part Overview

In just the last two decades, wireless services have catapulted from the practically nonexistent to over 86 million U.S. and more than 200 million subscribers worldwide. In the U.S., a new wireless subscriber is added every two seconds, about 42,000 per day. Within the telecommunications industry, only the Internet's growth is in the same league as wireless service growth. It is generally estimated that there will be more mobile devices than PCs connected to the Internet by 2003.

Some trace the origins of today's booming wireless market to Edwin Howard Armstrong's 1935 breakthrough discovery that frequency modulation (FM), as opposed to amplitude modulation (AM) in broadcast radio applications, greatly enhances speech and audio quality. While FM and even more exotic modulation and multiple access techniques (Chapters 4 and 5) remain crucial in modern cellular telephone systems, the middle 80s' appearance of inexpensive, lightweight, and low-power microcomputers to automate complex subscriber set call handling, power control, and other signaling and supervisory functions, makes microcomputer electronics an equally important enabling technology.

But if radio modulation, multiple-access techniques and microcomputer electronics stand as twin technology pillars, wireless' spectacular growth in the United States must be attributed in no small part to the open and competitive environment in which the cellular telephone industry found itself in its formative years. In May 1981, a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Order mandated that there be two licenses granted in each of...