[NA] We Could Have Had Cell Phones 40 Years Sooner

[DJTorrente]

"We Could Have Had Cell Phones 40 Years Sooner: The holdup was not technology, but government. What else do we not have because of Washington?"

https://www.rodmartin.org/p/we-coul...mpaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

In 1987, the brick mobile phone was an icon of consipicuous consumption.



What else, indeed?

 

[Kenny Phillips]

"We Could Have Had Cell Phones 40 Years Sooner: The holdup was not technology, but government. What else do we not have because of Washington?"

https://www.rodmartin.org/p/we-coul...mpaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

In 1987, the brick mobile phone was an icon of consipicuous consumption.

View attachment 152804

What else, indeed?

I had a Motorola bag phone in the late eighties. IIRC, besides paying a huge price for the used bag phone, I was paying sixty cents a minute for time, plus a service fee. Worth it, for the biz I was in, but incredibly expensive, compared to today.
Ultimately the technology simply wasn't cheap, and sometimes exists for a long time before it gets cheap, and if the usage doesn't hit critical mass, it never becomes cheap.
Think aircraft, or just engines for same, and avionics.

 

[Baked Potato]

*Looks at the rest of the articles on that guy's website

"Critical Sex Theory: How to keep Marx out of your Bedroom"

Lol, I'm not taking anything this guy says as fact. Is this where you get your news from? Honest question.

 

[Katamarino]

Articles like this tend to forget that the rest of the world exists and is perfectly capable of doing their own thing.

Is he claiming that the US government's frequency licencing tactics also somehow blocked mobile phone development for 40 years in Europe, Japan, etc?

 

[Bob Noel]

Articles like this tend to forget that the rest of the world exists and is perfectly capable of doing their own thing.

Is he claiming that the US government's frequency licencing tactics also somehow blocked mobile phone development for 40 years in Europe, Japan, etc?

especially with much of the world not having quite the infrastruture that the US had... made going to cellphones and smartphones much easier in other parts of the world (at least that's my understanding... I could have been misled)

 

[dmspilot]

His top story is about Iran's surrender. Lol yeah sure buddy.

 

[flyingron]

Technology marches on. I went through the whole MTS, IMTS, Cellular craze and frankly, it was a low priority because it should have been a low priority. With the pricing that would have been inherent at the time, it was never going to be ubiquitous as it is today and landline in the US ( unlike some other countries) was deeply entrenched. You'll also have to remember that even in the 50s, we were beginning to see rumblings about putting more restrictions on "TPC."

You also understand that despite the channel multiplexing of the cellular concept, it was still highly capacity limited until the fancier digital modulation schemes came along.

HDTV was proposed before people even had color TV, but again bandwidth stopped it until we got digital modulation schemes.