When cell phones first became commercially available in the United States in 1983, an explosion of sales soon followed. Today, cell phones are a $40 billion industry; one out of three people in the United States carries one in a pocket or a bag. But were it not for regulatory red tape, cell phones might have been available to high-tech swingers in the 1960s.
As far back as 1947, AT&T had developed the basic cellular concept: a network of small geographical areas with a low-powered transmitter in each to serve mobile phones. Looking to the future, the company asked the Federal Communications Commission to allocate more frequencies for the CB-radio-like car phone; once car phones with trunk-sized receivers became a mass phenomenon, AT&T reasoned, there would be a financial incentive to pursue more portable technology. (The transistor would be introduced by AT&T’s Bell Labs that same year.)
The FCC was unimpressed, however, and in 1949 allocated only a few more channels for mobile-phone use. Car phones, the FCC declared, were “more in the nature of convenience or luxury,” and less in the “public interest.” The result: each service area could handle only 23 mobile calls at any given time. Companies elected not to waste their time developing mobile phones for such a limited market.
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