the old base station to release the channel the mobile was previously using, making it available
for further use.
Summary
The analogue systems were a major technological achievement for their time, and in addition to
this they also established a market that grew very much faster than expected. However, there were
several drawbacks to the system that were soon discovered. With the rapidly growing number of
subscribers, capacity started to become a major issue. This was why the FCC in the USA, and
the equivalent in governments around the world, started to allocate further spectra. In the UK,
the TACS system was extended as ETACS to provide further capacity. However, it was obvious
that new technology would be needed to overcome the problem in the lon ...