The era of pre-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. 

Swedish Telecom was the first to operate an automatic mobile telephone system (MTA) in 1956. The development of the MTA system started at the end of the 1940s (Hulten, Molleryd 1995). Germany introduced its first mobile service in 1958, the so-called A-Netz.  

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) 

The A-Netz was basically the interconnection of previously existing special mobile services such as maritime and emergency radio services (Stolcke 1991, Jung, Wamecke 1998, p. 3-57). 

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