Nowadays, there are few corners of the civilised world that are not hooked up to mobile networks. Mobile phones have become such a ubiquitous part of the fabric of our society that we sometimes forget that, up until relatively recently, there was no such thing as a mobile telecommunications network anywhere in the world. Nowadays, mobile telephone networks are big news, with multi-billion dollar turnovers and transmitters all over the world. In the 1950s, however, there was only one mobile telecommunications network, and you had to go to Sweden if you wanted to use it. If you want to make a few calls when you're out and about nowadays, you can get yourself a package from Vodafone that will give you a free phone, with unlimited calls and texts, as part of an affordable monthly payment plan. Back then, you had to be pretty well heeled in order to be able to afford to make just one call on a mobile phone!

One of the main problems with mobile phone technology in the early days was the fact that transmission was lost and needed to be re-established when you went from one transmission zone to another. This problem was rectified by an engineer at Bell Labs in the US, who invented an automatic ?call handoff? system in nineteen seventy. In 1971, the American telecommunications giant AT&T submitted a proposal for a mobile telephone network dubbed the Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS), to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). After years of hearings, the proposal was approved in 1982, and the AMPS network was allocated frequencies between 824 and 894 MHz. The AMPs network was upgraded to digital technology in 1990 and is still in use today in upgraded form.

The world's first fully automatic mobile phone system, memorably named MTA (Mobile Telephone system A), was developed by Ericsson and was released in Sweden in 1956. This was the first system that was able to operate without the need for an operator plugging things in at the transmitter base, but due to the valves it employed in its electronics, it was very power-hungry and was extremely heavy. The invention of transistors in the early sixties paved the way for a lighter, less power-hungry model, the MTB. The MTB network had managed to get 600 decidedly wealthy Swedes to sign up for it by the time it was closed down in 1983, and as such could be considered much more successful than its predecessor.

Among the first properly successful commercial mobile phone networks to be available to the civilian population, called ARP, was set up in Finland in 1971. ARP is often referred to as being a zero generation (0G) cellular network, in that the technology was more advanced than early systems such as MTB or RAT, but not as advanced as the systems that were to follow, such as AMPS, which many people consider to be of the first generation of mobile phone technology as we now know it.