Cell phones shrink, their market explodes

When Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first cell-phone call from a street in New York to his rival at Bell Labs on April 3, 1973, he used a bricklike prototype that weighed 30 oz and implemented the AMPS (analog-mobile-phone-system) format. The first commercial cell phone, the Motorola DynaTRAC 8000X hit the market 10 years later; it weighed 28 oz, offered 30 to 60 minutes of talk time and eight hours of standby time, and retailed for $3995. By 1990, there were about a million subscribers in the United States; by 1994, that number had reached 24 million, and by 2004, it had reached 190 million, according to CTIA Wireless (www.ctiawireless.com).

But cell-phone systems need much more than a handset: They need base stations that link to each other and to the land-line system, through the Mobile Telephone Switching Office, plus a complex network-management infrastructure that ensures proper cell hand-off and billing. In 1994, there were 18,000 cell sites, compared with more than 175,000 now.