Mobile Communications Advancement

By: Keith Hearne
Today mobile communication is virtually everywhere. If you do not possess a mobile phone chances are out of the next 10 people you meet today, 9 out of 10 will. The mobile communications market is undergoing a great deal of change presently, and this is set to continue. Over the next few years people will continue to see new and improved services, devices as well as improved deliverance being introduced. So where have we come from, and where have we come to?
A great deal of the advancement and creation of the mobile or wireless sector of the global market has to be attributed to the big conglomerate companies like Motorola. From the time man first landed on the moon right up to the current movements into the next generation(2.5G and 3G) of mobile services and devices, Motorola has been there every step of the way. When Neil Armstrong’s first words were relayed from the moon to the earth, they were done so through a Motorola radio transponder that provides two-way voice and television signal transmission. Then right through the 1980′s Motorola worked hard at providing cellular technology and in the late 80′s introduced personal cellular telephones into the market place. In fact the 1980s was the decade of the boom for wireless communication. During this decade pagers grew in popularity, the first cellular car-phone appeared followed closely by the first portable mobile phone in the world, and then great improvements were made in both the weight and size of these devices in the years that followed.
One of the most ambitious and significant advancements in the mobile communications arena at the time was the Iridium System (www.iridium.com), a concept for global personal communications. Iridium involved 77 Low Earth Orbit(LEO) satellites operated by Boeing, and twelve ground station gateways that link the Iridium satellite constellation to terrestrial wireless and landline public telephone networks, providing one hundred percent global coverage. Research and development work on the Iridium system started in 1987, pioneered by Motorola engineers Ray Leopold, Ken Peterson, and Bary Bertiger. Iridium service started on November 1, 1998 by Iridium LLC (founded in 1991 and having invested about $7 billion), but later went into liquidation. With a $3,000 price for an Iridium phone, plus international calling rates of up to $7 a minute, the company brought in only 15,000 customers before going bust, and was later taken over by Iridium Satellite LLC who acquired Iridium through the bankruptcy courts and resumed service on March 28, 2001. Iridium Satellite LLC currently provide services to the United States Department of Defense.
In the last five years, we have all seen the progression of mobile phones as they practically took over the planet. A few years ago a mobile phone was a commodity, now it’s almost, and indeed to some people is a necessity. New gadgets are being introduced into the market on a daily basis; the market is swamped with wireless and
mobile devices like the new GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) phones, which allow customers to experience fast and “always-on” access to the internet while only being charged for what they actually download and not the time spent browsing. Also we have devices like O2′s new XDA, combining a mobile phone with a pocket PC.
The apparent sacrifice that we seem to have made for this technology is the presence of base stations and ugly masts on the horizons, allowing signal coverage to the more remote places in our countries. So what next? Will the new wave of new fangled devices that offer us the world mean we will be overrun with bigger and uglier masts in order to provide us with such services? It may not be all that bad. While there have been advances in technologies provided, there is also a lot of research, development and resources going into how these technologies are deployed. We may see a decline in the use of the masts as the years go by.
On the week of July 24th this year, a US company ‘Sky Tower’, said it had successfully performed a series of tests in Hawaii of its new technology, a communications airplane called Pathfinder-Plus. This airplane is unmanned, solar-powered and with advancements in battery technology could stay airborne for six-months at a time while operating above the weather and air traffic at 65,000 feet. It is envisaged that by 2005 people might be receiving mobile phone services, broadband connections and even digital TV from these or similar solar-powered airplanes. The advantages of which would mean, more coverage and more efficient delivery due to their high vantage and consumption of less than 1/10,000 the power used by a typical terrestrial broadcast transmitter that has to overcome buildings, trees and other obstructions to cover the same area. The aesthetics of such a delivery would be a great improvement on today’s terrestrial tower build-outs and backhaul also.
So the truth of it is that we have come a long way in the last few decades in terms of mobile communications advancement. However with the big hitters like NTT DoCoMo, NEC, Toshiba and many more pumping colossal amounts of time, money, resources and expenditure into such projects as the Pathfinder-Plus, its clear that we’ve only seeing the tip of the iceberg so far.