More information on “Ring’s Ma Bell: the Cell Network”
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From the Holmdel lab, Doug Ring, assisted by Rae Young, drew up “Mobile Telephony: Wide Area Coverage.” In the abstract, Ring says, “It is postulated that an adequate mobile radio system should provide service to any equipped vehicle at any point in the whole country.” When a person traveled between each zone, the signal to their phone would switch over to the appropriate frequency. Even Ring knew he was looking far into the future, when he wrote, “The final objective cannot be realized for a long time to come…”
Early mobile phone networks were so small that cities had waiting lists of residents wanting to be able to install and use car phones.
Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.
Stations were arranged hexagonally, with one at each vertex and one in the center to ensure minimal interference and optimization of frequencies. The shape of the network took on a honeycomb shape or “cells.” The term “cellular” network came from this pattern, although Young and Ring never used this word in their paper.
Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.
The research teams went mobile: Bill Jakes, a leader of Project Echo, traveled all over New York and New Jersey in a company van studying the possibilities of mobile communication over microwaves and Gerry DiPiazza, from the Whippany lab, drove around the Philadelphia area in a trailer home with experimental cellular equipment to answer practical questions about the antenna.
Image Courtesy of Richard Frenkiel and AT&T Archives and History Center.
Left to right: Sam Halpern, Jim O’Brien, Bob Schoenwiesner, Dick Frenkiel and Phil DiPiazza.
Gerry (brother to Phil, pictured here) DiPiazza’s team made the decision that unlike landlines, cell phones should not have dial tones, rather that people should enter a number and then press a button to send the call. This meant the phone would spend less time using the network’s resources.
Image Courtesy of Richard Frenkiel.
When FCC progress stalled in the 1960s, Frenkiel and Porter turned their attention to the Metroliner project, which would provide phone service on trains running between Washington D.C. and Manhattan. This payphone service launched in 1969. In order to have phone service on board trains for commuters, the calls had to be handed off to new cells as the train moved, making it the first cellular network.
Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.