martin cooper inventer of cellular system in 1973 (30 year interview in 2003)

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dyna tac dyna t.a.c first cellphone used in new york in april 1973
first call made by martin cooper to rival bell labs.



Cell phone inventor 30 years after
By Ben Charny, CNET News.com
14/4/2003


Cell phone inventor Martin Cooper doesn't get any special treatment
from carriers just because he created the now ubiquitous cell phone
three decades ago. Even his Motorola V.60 from Verizon Wireless cuts
off callers in midsentence, he said.

So count Cooper among the tens of millions of wireless dialers
wondering why carriers are pushing new features like text messaging,
when what they ought to do is make sure that calls go through all the
time.

As he puts it "We have not yet achieved the original dream" of being
able to use a phone anywhere and call anyone anywhere.





Cooper also believes that time is fleeting for cellular technology,
which might have run its course. The industry needs to find a better
way of ferrying calls over the air, he said.

He spoke about these and other topics with CNET News.com on the 30th
anniversary of the first-ever cell phone call.

Q: You made the first cell phone call. What happened?
A: Here we are on, out on the streets of New York, surrounded by these
blasé New Yorkers gawking at us because they've never seen somebody
standing on the street dialing a phone number with one of these. I
decided this was a great opportunity to needle my counterpart at Bell
Laboratories. I would not suggest he was a friendly competitor, but we
had been speaking. I called him and said, 'Joe, I'm calling you from a
real portable cellular telephone.' I thought I heard gnashing of teeth
in the background, but he was polite. And we had a chat for a while.

So the first cell phone call was to talk some smack?
I love competition.

What do you think of the merging of cell phones and other devices,
like PDAs?
I'm not crazy about the concept of universal devices. I think the way
you serve people is by optimizing the functionality of whatever it is
you're building. If you try to make something universal, it does not
do any of those things very well. The carriers have gone just a little
bit too far in trying to consolidate all these things into one
gadget--telephones, PDAs, cameras, MP3 players. They've become so
difficult to use and thus compromise the features.

So you aren't buying any camera phones. Instead of the "Swiss Army
knife" of phones, what should the industry focus on?
I think we are going to regress. We are going to start, first of all,
with a really good cellular phone that works all the time. And we
haven't gotten quite there yet.

Are you satisfied with voice coverage?
We have not yet achieved the original dream. There was no technical
reason why cellular shouldn't be as reliable and as low in cost as a
wired phone. If you can serve enough people from a single station and
you don't have to run wires to a new location, it ought to be lower in
cost. The carriers have to move onto the next generation of
technology. And they ought to focus instead of looking for different
applications and forcing these applications on people; they ought to
be fixing the fundamental problem: getting voice right. You can make a
call, but how long can you keep talking before it drops?

What's wrong?
There are too many people on a limited amount of channels. What they
have to do is come up with new technology that makes this same number
of channels accommodate more people. That's why you get dropped calls
almost all the time. It has nothing to do with coverage, which is
really pretty good. What happens is you move from one cell to another,
there are no channels available and all of a sudden you find yourself
talking to empty space.

But carriers seem to be pushing their data services over their core
product--voice.
Yes.

You ever sent a short text message? Ever sent a picture message?
I use a little bit of data; I do get e-mail messages on my cell phone.
That's the extent of it. SMS is too hard to use in the United States.
I'm sure there are a lot of applications that would do very well that
do have a data capability. But it's too slow to do any of what you
would call Internet applications. Even the highly touted
next-generation cellulars. You're lucky if you get speeds equal to a
dialup. Furthermore, thinking you could watch a movie on a screen that
big is kind of silly.

So how do things like MMS get started?
We're still looking at the old monopoly way of thinking. Look at the
old AT&T: Bell Labs would think of things, and they would turn it over
to Western Electric. They would manufacture it, and then give it to an
operating company who would give it to the consumer and say, `This is
what you want.' The competitive world doesn't work that way. They have
an entrepreneur--a marketing guy--going around saying, `Here's a need
not being fulfilled. I'm going to take care of that need.' They go
back to the labs and say, `Engineers go and build this.' That's how a
competitive free enterprise world works.

Where does Wi-Fi fit in with cellular?
Wi-Fi is wonderful. It is a superb local area network--what it was
designed to do--and it does that very well. When you try to make Wi-Fi
cover a wide area, it's absolutely the worst way to do it. Think about
it. In order to cover a city, you need a million sites; we actually
did an analysis of that. And every one of them has got to have
backhaul. So it turns out it's neither economical nor practical.

But most U.S. cellular carriers are building hot spots all over the
place. Are they making the wrong move? There are people who are
talking about doing hot spots. For some, that might be functional, but
hot spots are a little like phone booths. What happened to the phone
booth when everybody has a phone...The phone booth is pretty much
obsolete. That's what's going to happen in the future to Wi-Fi. We
will have systems that provide inexpensive wide area coverage that
were designed for that purpose.

When you made the world's first cell phone call, you had all the
spectrum to yourself. But apparently, there's now a shortage. Is that
right?
We've been using the spectrum better and better for a hundred years.
When Marconi made his first transatlantic call, he used the entire
usable spectrum all over the world for one phone call. Subsequently,
we have managed on the average to double that capability --the number
of calls you could make in the whole spectrum in the whole
world--every two and a half years. We are a trillion times better
today than where we were when Marconi was calling in 1896.

What's the next big step for the cell phone?
The carriers are now using this modern technology called cellular. But
wait a second, it was invented in 1945 and implemented in 1983. We're
ready for the next generation, which I think are smart antennas. With
that, you don't need nearly as much spectrum. It literally multiplies
the spectrum by many times.

Are there any new wireless technologies you're excited about?
We just had a photographer taking pictures, talking about how he could
send one picture in two minutes. My vision of photography in the
future is you take a picture of somebody and in one second that
picture appears somewhere else far away. It's the same with music
downloading and telemedicine.