While Cell Phones were not popular tech, how were car phones able to be so seemingly widespread? What makes the differences in technology between the two?

Question

Perhaps my interpretation of this is wrong, but it seems like car phones were much more widespread and easily accessible to most members of the public as opposed to Cellular Phones which were almost exclusively for the very wealthy/businesspeople etc. Is there a difference in the tech that made this so? How does a car phone work, if its different than how a cell phone works? TIA

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Answer 1

The first mobile phones were in cars for the simple reason of the size weight and power requirement. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_DynaTAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_DynaTAC) was the first handheld phone released in 1984 at a cost of $3,995 is equivalent to $11,253 in 2022. It was 25 cm long and had a mass of 1 kg, the battery offered 30 minutes of talk time after 10 hours of charging. Car-mounted phones were still cheaper not limited by a battery.

A cellphone is a technical portable phone that uses a radio network with a cellular architecture. Later phones in cars were cell phones too but very early were not.

The first mobile phone did not use cellular networks. the first commercial is Mobile Telephone Service (MTS) released by Bell in 1946. The equipment had a mass of 36 kg, You had one high-power radio transmitter that could cover quite a large area, The problem is there is a limited amount of available radio spectrum. MTS when released covered the St. Louis metropolitan area with a total of 3 channels, so there could be a total of 3 simultaneous calls for all users. The larger extended it to 32 changes but still not a lot for a city.

A cellular system uses many but shorter-range radio transmitters. You can reuse the same chance channels as long as the transmitter is not a direct neighbor. Look at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Frequency_reuse.svg the transmitter in the middle that uses change F1 is surrounded by 6 towers but they only use diffrent changes. So if you build a cellular network like that you only need 4 changes that you can result over and over. When a phone moves it can jump between transmitters without the user noticing it. This is the key to how cellular networks can handle an enormous amount of users, and reuse the same spectrum

There are other improvements like more calls using the same frequency range because it is digital. There is a new way to use the same channel more efficiently, there is more changes that can have higher frequency because we have electronics that can handle that. But even with that improvement, the system could not handle all traffic if we just had one higher power transmitter that covered all of the city.

The first cell mobile phone system was placed 1979 in Japan, which predates the first handheld mobile phone by 4 years.

So lot of car phones were cellular phones it just depended on when they were made and what technology was used. I am not sure if all commercial-handled phones used cell systems but I would not be surprised if that did.

So car vs handled is just a question of how compact and expensive electronics are used not what system they transmitted, there are cellular phones for both models.