History of cellular phones dates back to 1910. Magnus Ericsson fitted a telephone in his car and travelled through the country, he stopped at places where phone lines were accessible and connected to them with electric wires.
Two Soviet engineers named I. Zaharchenko and G. Shapiro tested a mobile phone successfully in 1946. After a year, two engineers of Bell labs, W. Rae Young and Douglas H. Ring suggested hexagonal cells in mobile phones using a three directional antenna for signals. Cellular technology was later developed in 1960s electronics were developed by Joel Engel and Richard Frenkiel of Bell Labs.
The MTA or Mobile Telephone System A was the first completely automatic mobile phone system. It was developed by Ericsson and sold in Sweden in 1956. It had a total weight of 40 kgs. The model was upgraded to MTB in 1965 which had a light weight of 9 kgs.
Leonid Kupriyanovich , a Soviet engineer created a portable type of mobile phone in 1957. It was named LK-1. It was fairly small handset with antenna and was a true mobile phone. It weighed as less as 3 kgs, operating up to a distance of 30 kms and having a battery life of 30 hours. In 1958, this radiophone was resized to a pocket version having a improved light weight of 500 grams.
Russia continued with the development of mobile phones in 1958. It could serve 6 customers and was connected to a base station. The shortcoming of this system was that calls kept being disrupted.
In 1970, this problem was solved when another engineer of Bell Labs named Amos E. Joel, Jr. invented a "call handoff" system which was automatic. The element of disruption was finished.
The ARP network was successfully launched in Finland in 1971. It was believed as a zero generation cellular network. The first generation network was the Motorola DynaTAC released in 1973. It was followed by second generation 2G phones with CDMA, iDEN and GSM in 1990s. 3G networks came later with their fast services and they are widespread in use. 2G phones have been phased out. The future of technology is the live streaming of television and radio.