Fundamentals of LTE

Chapter 1. Evolution of Cellular Technologies

1.1 Introduction

All over the world, wireless communications services have enjoyed dramatic growth over the past 25 years. It was only in late 1983 that the first commercial cellular telephone system in the United States was deployed by Ameritech in the Chicago area. That was the analog service called Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS). Today, digital cellular telephone services are available throughout the world, and have well surpassed fixed-line telephone services both in terms of availability and number of users. In fact, as of March 2010 we have over 4.8 billion mobile subscribers in the world, which is more than double the number of fixed line subscribers and amounts to a higher than 60% ...