Mobile telephony

But reliable, portable monitoring devices are only one element in the equation. The second is the network across which the data they collect can be sent—and here two new technologies are particularly relevant third-generation (3G) mobile telephony and a wireless network protocol known formally as 802.11 and colloquially as Wi-Fi. 

TV, video display units, induction heaters Induction heaters, electronic surveillance Radio AM, FM, and TV broadcasting Mobile telephony GSM (European standard)... 

Integrated solutions Combination of products and services for addressing customer needs Nokia s, array of products for mobile telephony... 

Pakistan as a country is well suited for this study due to at least two reasons (1) the fact that there is a vast network of government-sponsored health workers already working in the county, with most of the rural population in Pakistan depending upon these community health workers for their healthcare needs and (2) the reach of telecommunication networks has expanded exponentially over the last decade, leading to 90% penetration nationwide. Therefore, mobile telephony is available in far reaches of the country. Therefore, building a system that uses mobile and Internet technology is possible. Moreover, the availability of a nefwork of community health workers has provided an opportunity to reach easily to vast populations in remote or underserviced areas. 

In Colombia and many other countries there is a high concentration of property in some services. For instance, mobile telephony in Colombia was owned at the time by only two companies and a one minute call was as expensive as a single tide in public transportation. 

In these case, a lead market is a country that has the ability to change preferences in other markets. In the mobile communication example, a country that is often imitated could have initiated the mobile telephony boom. It just became hip in countries with a dense fixed line telephone net to use mobile phones instead, despite its doubtful additional real benefit. Real benefit of goods and therefore preferences, however, can change with working conditions and lifestyle. Increasing mobility, environmental pollution, and female work participation are global trends that change the preferences of consumers as well as industrial users. 

In this case study, four hypotheses shall be supported. First, that mobile telephony is a lead market phenomenon. Second, that the lead market can be differentiated by the lead market factors derived in the first chapter. Third, that the firms located or having their headquarters in the lead market became internationally conq)eti-tive. Fourth, that the lead market could have been identified before the mobile telephony industry emerged as a mass market in the early 1990s. 

The methodology followed here is based on the lead market concept elaborated on earlier. The study is an international comparison of lead market factors for the case of mobile telephony. It is examined whether the rank of adoption of the dominant design in mobile telephony is correlated with the degree of markedness of the lead market factors. For some lead market factors quantitative indicators could be found, for other factors the international comparison has to be qualitative. In addition, the roles of supply factors for the international diffusion of mobile telephony, such as technological knowledge leads and suppliers, are discussed. 

The first mobile telephony systems were pre-cellular services. The base station was hosted by a powerful broadcast tower, which was normally located in the centre of a metropolitan area covering a wide area of 60-80 km radius (Paetsch 1993, p. 23). Subscribers could not move from one of these areas to another dui -ing calls and the caller had to know in which area the person he or she wanted to call was circulating. The difference between cellular and pre-cellular mobile telephony is that in a cellular system, a user can move from one zone to another zone during a call without reinitiating the call. This is possible because a cellular... 

Cellular Mobile Telephony as a Dominant Design 135 Figure 4-1 Diffusion of cellular telephony in several countries 1980-2000... 

Before I elaborate on the lead market factors that were responsible for the successful international diffusion, I shall briefly review the history of mobile telephony. Three distinct periods in which the usage of mobile communication fundamentally changed can be identified the period of pre-cellular telephony, of analog cellular and of digital cellular mobile telephony. 

Mobile radio communication started in the 1920s in the United States as a oneway service to police cars. In 1946, a mobile telephone service for private users, the Mobile telephony system (MTS), was introduced in the US market by AT T (Calhoun 1988). This service was later operated by several private operators, the radio common carriers (RCC). In the 1950s mobile telephony started in Europe. 

These first pre-cellular mobile systems had a small capacity and were confined to a small group of subscribers who used mobile telephony predominantly for the ir jobs, such as doctors and taxi drivers. For instance, the German A-Netz had a capacity of 1,000 subscribers and its successor, the B-Netz, which started in 1970, could handle 10,000 subscribers. In New York City, only 12 users among the 543 subscribers could make calls at the same time (1976) 2,400 customers were on a waiting list to subscribe to the service (Lee 1989, p. 2). In other countries, too, there was much more demand for mobile telephony than could be offered by the telephone operator. In the 1970s the first networks were substituted with gradually improved systems like the B-Netz in Germany, the MTC and a manual interim system MTD in Scandinavia, and the IMTS (Improved Mobile telephony system)... 

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