Dialogues on Mobile Communication

Adriana de Souza e Silva

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315534596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, top scholars in the field of mobile communication discuss the major issues related to the use of mobile phones in today's society, such as the tension between private and public, youth mobile culture, creative appropriations of mobile devices, and mobile methods. Each chapter unfolds as an open dialogue between scholars and graduate students of communication. They contain an introduction by a student, followed by a short lecture and a question and answer section with the students, and a closing statement by a student that responds to the scholar's argument. The book is a valuable resource not only for individuals interested in mobile communication, but also students and teachers willing to use the affordances of mobile media to expand the physical boundaries of classrooms and promote collaborative learning practices.

1

History

Eric John Abrahamson, with Larissa Carneiro

Introduction: Larissa Carneiro

Eric John Abrahamson is a historian of the United States. More specifically, he works on the American history of technological innovations. Abrahamson’s academic trajectory implies a fundamental question: Is there anything more “American” than the quest for technological progress? Of course, Abrahamson is not alone in tracking technological development in the United States. Another Americanist scholar, Leo Marx (2000), is also a reference in the investigation of the role that technology has played in the cultural constitution of this nation. For Marx, the social fabric of “America” was sewn from the idea of creating a new Garden, a new Jerusalem, one in which technology would be an ally for harnessing natural resources. Unlike Marx, however, Abrahamson’s paradise is not composed of train tracks and steam machines from the nineteenth century, but invisible networks of communication. Moreover, it is a Garden that is not ruled by a divine will, but regulated by a ubiquitous entity: the State. In short, Abrahamson is interested in the action of regulatory systems on the technological development of mobile communication in the United States.

A basic question moved the author’s investigation: Why did it take so long for cellular service to go from an idea to commercial reality when the seeds of mobile technology were already available and, no less important, when there were also ready financial resources to invest in such innovation?

In this chapter, Abrahamson explores how the development and commercialization of cellular telephone technology in the United States reflects a coevolution of technology and regulation. He addresses the history of mobile telephony to explore the political economy of the United States between 1945 and 1984, highlighting the behavior of four primary actors in the development of mobile service in the United States: AT&T, Motorola, a group of entrepreneurs known as “Radio Common Carriers,” and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Abrahamson tells an epic story in which State bureaucracy plays a key role in the development of cellular infrastructure in America. We learn here that, unlike any other country, the development of mobile communications in the United States unveils a “really fascinating case in the history of regulation” and, of course, democracy.

Lecture: Eric Abrahamson

AT&T first proposed to develop the concept of cellular in 1947, but it took until 1983 for the service to actually become available to commercial users in the United States. This story was the focus of my dissertation. The dissertation looks at four critical questions: 1 Why did it take 36 years for cellular service to go from an idea to commercial service? 2 What does this story teach us about the nature of political competition within the American economy? 3 How does the evolution of the cellular system clarify our understanding of the regulatory process? 4 Finally, how does it explain the process of technological and business innovation within our political economy? These political dynamics operate in all sectors of a regulated economy.

In the dissertation, I focused on the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, but today the situation is very similar, only at a larger scale. There are vast sums of money that go into political competition. Congress and the regulatory agencies are filled with people fighting for competitive advantage in the marketplace. The paper that you all read is a summary of my dissertation (Abrahamson, 2003). I’m looking forward to your questions and the conversation, but I do want to summarize a couple of key points.

Mobile radio is a radio-based technology, obviously. Therefore, it depends on use of the radio spectrum, which is a public resource. All of these businesses that want to use this public resource and depend on it to be successful, have to be good political competitors. The use of the radio spectrum has evolved over 100 years, and so has the regulatory system. Business innovators, regulators and members of Congress have evolved their own ideas about which uses of spectrum should have priority over others.

For many years broadcast services like television had the highest priority. Radio-based mobile telephony fell by the wayside. Why was that? First, people were accustomed to the landline system. They really could not understand the need to make a call from their car. There were pay phones everywhere and that seemed good enough. Second, mobile radio was seen as essentially a business tool, used to coordinate fleets of moving vehicles like taxicabs, trucks or railroad cars. People did not understand that it could be used just for ordinary conversations.

When I was doing my research, one of the most interesting quotes I found was offered by an executive from General Electric (GE) to the FCC. This was shortly before cellular service was launched, and most of you probably don’t remember, but there was a big mobile citizens’ band (CB) craze in the United States in the 1970s. There were songs about truckers and everybody was on their CB radios. In his testimony this GE executive said: “One of the things that we’ve learned from the whole CB craze is that people have an insatiable desire to communicate, even when they have nothing to say.”

Thus the early debates about mobile telephony were focused on utilitarian values. The idea that your friends would call to chat, or that a husband might call his wife on his way home to ask if he needed to pick up milk or how the day went,¹ those things had no value within the existing regulatory paradigm. How did the paradigm change over decades? That is part of what I explore in the dissertation and part of why I’m really excited to talk to all of you.

To understand this paradigm change, we have to understand the situation. There were four players in the cellular story in the United States: AT&T, which was the head of the Bell System, the monopoly phone carrier in the United States (see Figure 1.1); Motorola, the leading provider of two-way radio communications from the 1930s all the way up to the 1970s; and the Radio Common Carriers, or RCCs, who were this kind of ragtag band of entrepreneurs, who operated in cities all over the country. Radio Common Carriers provided radio services for people who needed two-way communications, but they also got to operate in this marginal area of public mobile radio as well. The fourth player was the FCC, which was evolving in this era.

Figure 1.1 AT&T Mobile Phone Service (AMPS) was launched in 1946. The company hoped the FCC would provide sufficient radio spectrum to develop a national mobile phone system (Copyright: AT&T Archives).

AT&T fought hard to create public mobile radio services, but the FCC was not interested in this market. Motorola did not want public radio services because they understood that their business focused on two-way radio communications, such as the walkie-talkie. Motorola had invented the walkie-talkie, dispatch radio was their bread and butter, and they wanted to promote that kind of service. The Radio Common Carriers just wanted to build their businesses. They saw a public mobile telephone service as a threat if it was given exclusively to AT&T, and as an opportunity if they could be allowed into the business. Finally, the FCC was really held captive by the broadcasters. They thought that the highest and best use for radio spectrum was for television, and for many years they were trying to expand the range of television offerings.

A critical part of this story relates to the FCC’s failed effort to expand the number of broadcast channels by using ultra-high frequency parts of the spectrum, otherwise known as UHF. The FCC thought that UHF could be used to develop “good” television that would be instructional and educational and would raise the quality of American civilization. As it turned out, the UHF spectrum was not as good for broadcast television and television broadcasters had no real desire to expand the marketplace. So, this spectrum was largely unused for decades. In fact, only recently this spectrum was made available to mobile communications.

So what changed? By the 1960s and 1970s it was clear that UHF television was failing. It was also clear that the demand for mobile radio was much bigger than anyone thought. Meanwhile, the FCC was of two minds. On the one hand, they asserted that the demand for mobile radio was not sufficient to justify the allocation of spectrum to a broad mobile radio system. On the other hand, they said the potential demand was insatiable and that no allocation of spectrum would be sufficient to meet this demand. Breakthroughs in technology, however, began to suggest a solution to this conundrum.

Figure 1.2 With the development of pagers, a new, competitive market emerged for telecommunications services. Introduced by AT&T at the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962, the Bellboy pager operated on the first citywide broadcast paging system (Copyright: AT&T Archives).

In order to make the cellular concept work, you had to have electronic switching. You also had to have new kinds of phones that were able to handle that switching to move the call between different radio or “cell” towers. The FCC believed that only AT&T was capable of building such a sophisticated system and they saw cellular telephony as an extension of the Bell System’s existing monopoly.

The FCC’s vision terrified Motorola, which recognized that cellular would undermine its existing businesses in radio dispatch systems. The history of the final evolution of public mobile wireless service, which goes from the late 1960s until 1983, became a story of Motorola fighting to block regulatory approval for AT&T’s proposed system while it scrambled to develop the technology to prove to the FCC that Motorola could compete with AT&T in cellular.

I will close this story by telling a little vignette. In 1973, Motorola’s lead technology developer was a guy named Martin Cooper. As I said, Motorola’s critical strategy was to stall the regulatory process long enough for Motorola to develop the technical capacity to compete with AT&T. In 1973, Motorola could build a two-way radio system, but, unlike AT&T, they didn’t know how to build an electronic switched network, which was a critical component in the development of cellular telephony. Therefore, Martin Cooper and Motorola had to convince the FCC, just like a magician, to look the other way. To convince the FCC that they knew how to make this call, Martin Cooper staged a publicity stunt in New York City, using what has been called the first hand-held mobile phone.

The phone itself represented a significant innovation. It used integrated circuits to operate efficiently with low-power, 14-volt batteries. It also used an eight-chip frequency synthesizer to accommodate 380 transmission channels, and integrated automatic output control so that the portable’s power output would compensate for the distance between the caller and the base station, conserving battery power and minimizing interference, but the call itself was not truly a mobile phone call because it did not rely on electronic switching to hand off the call from one radio tower to another, which was the essential element of a cellular system.

Nevertheless, Cooper and Motorola got the press there, and to this day, if you look up who is the inventor of the mobile phone, it’s Martin Cooper. It was an amazing publicity stunt to get the FCC to say, “Oh! Maybe there could be competition in this business.” Cooper’s stunt was enormously successful and bought Motorola time. By the early 1980s, Motorola was much farther along and was able to convince the FCC to grant two licenses in each market for the new cellular service.

Motorola’s political efforts, combined with those of the RCCs, played a key role in the development of competitive markets for cellular in the United States. In the rest of the world at that time, the first cellular systems were launched as part of a national monopoly telecommunications system. Thus the development of cellular telecommunications in the United States offers a fascinating case in the history of regulation.

Q&A

ADRIANA DE SOUZA E SILVA: Wasn’t the Motorola DynaTAC a mobile phone then?

ERIC ABRAHAMSON: To be clear, it was a phone designed to serve a cellular network, but that first phone call was not on a true cellular system because at the time Motorola did not have the capacity to create a switched network that could transfer a call in progress from one base station to another. This is really the critical innovation when we talk about creating “cellular” service. Marty Cooper’s call went to a single base station and then was connected into the landline network. He never moved out of range of that single base station. Today we think of the mobile phone as the device that’s in our hand, but that’s not the essence of what a mobile phone is. The essence of a mobile phone is a device that has the ability to place a call to a radio tower and connect to a system that allows that call to be transferred from one radio tower to the next radio tower as the phone is in motion in either a vehicle or on foot. That kind of system involves electronic switching.

ADRIANA DE SOUZA E SILVA: Do you know when the portable mobile phones that people use today started to be commercialized?

ERIC ABRAHAMSON: The first trial was launched in Chicago in 1978 by AT&T. Full commercial operation in the United States began in the fall of 1983.

ADRIANA DE SOUZA E SILVA: … But that was in trains, right? They put mobile phones in trains …

ERIC ABRAHAMSON: … That was even earlier. In 1969 they put mobile phones on Metroliner trains (see Figure 1.3). This system has been dubbed the “first linear cellular phone system,” but it relied on sensors in the track, and there was no intelligence in either the transmitter or the switch to create a truly cellular network.

Figure 1.3 Passengers on the Metroliner traveling the northeast corridor of the United States in 1969 placed phone calls on a system that was a precursor to cellular. It relied on sensors in the track to hand off the call from one radio base station to the next (Copyright: AT&T Archives).

HECTOR RENDON: Where would we be if the FCC had agreed to give AT&T the spectrum for the development of mobile phones earlier?

ERIC ABRAHAMSON: I believe that if the FCC had encouraged AT&T much earlier to begin the development of a really broad-based public mobile radio system, we would have had more innovation much earlier. We still probably would not have gotten to a cellular phone system until the mid-1970s because we were still dependent on other critical innovations. The development of microprocessors, for example, was necessary for the handset and in the electronic switching system. But many more people would have been using car phones much earlier, even in the 1960s, if there had been more spectrum available. I think it would have filled the market demand. The interesting question is, would it have grown as part of a monopoly system? The FCC had allowed the Radio Common Carriers into the business as early as the late 1940s, which was an unprecedented move. Everything else they were doing was to limit competition in telecommunications, so that was an unusual step, but it is unlikely that the Radio Common Carriers or even Motorola would have been able to develop the technology in the 1950s; they just didn’t have sufficient scale at that point. I’m not sure if we would have had a radically different world, but I think we would have seen innovations much earlier.

PINAR CEYHAN: When there is some kind of innovation, it seems that there is competition not only among corporations, but also among nations, and governments. How is this different today? Are the regulatory systems and governments more flexible nowadays, and more likely to provide the necessary infrastructure for innovations to take place?

ERIC ABRAHAMSON: Louis Galambos and I write about this issue in our book called Anytime, Anywhere (2002). It is a great case study that goes to the heart of that question. The first cellular systems were all analog, but everybody knew that they would eventually become digital. Even as the first analog systems were rolled out for commercial use, companies and governments were scrambling to set a standard for the digital technology. In Europe, governments got together with industry to establish one common digital standard and that standard became known as GSM. Because they came together and established the standard early, they were able to roll out digital technologies much faster than the United States. Moreover, those digital technologies provided a common platform for everybody else to innovate around. As European companies started to develop services based on digital technologies – like voicemail, call forwarding or text messaging – those services could be used on multiple platforms because everybody was using the same GSM standard. In the United States, because our tradition is less centralized, the FCC was unwilling to act in that same way to enforce the development of a common platform. As a result, the industry in the United States evolved a little more slowly and episodically. Some people developed the first digital platforms and rolled them out using a technology called TDMA.

In the story that we tell of Pacific Telesis, they were late in rolling out their digital strategy because they couldn’t decide which among three or four technologies to use, and they kept waiting for a company in San Diego called Qualcomm to develop a strategy that they said was going to be the best of all digital strategies on a platform called CDMA. So Pacific Telesis waited and waited and ultimately picked CDMA, but they were late to the market. What this meant was that some companies that relied on T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What is mobile communication, and how do we talk about it?
• 1. History
• 2. Mobile communication
• 3. Mobilities
• 4. Ubiquitous computing
• 5. Mobile internet
• 6. Design
• 7. Mobile social networks
• 8. Location-based media
• 9. Civic engagement
• 10. Youth culture
• 11. Global South
• Index