First U.S. Cellular Network Launches: Mobile Era Begins

Ameritech Mobile Communications launched the first commercial cellular network in the United States on October 13, 1983, activating service in Chicago. The network used the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) analog standard and initially covered the Chicago metropolitan area with a handful of cell towers. The first commercial call was made by Bob Barnett, president of Ameritech, to the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell in Berlin. The technology had been in development since the 1940s. AT&T's Bell Labs proposed the cellular concept in 1947, dividing geographic areas into "cells" served by low-power transmitters that could reuse the same frequencies across non-adjacent cells. The Federal Communications Commission took decades to allocate spectrum. Motorola's Martin Cooper had demonstrated a prototype handheld cellular phone in 1973, calling Joel Engel at Bell Labs from a Manhattan sidewalk. It took another ten years for the system to become commercially operational. The Chicago launch was modest by later standards. The phones cost between $2,500 and $3,500 (roughly $7,500 to $10,500 in today's dollars). Monthly service fees ran $50 or more, with per-minute charges on top. The handsets were enormous, mounted in cars or carried in bags the size of briefcases. The first portable models weighed nearly two pounds. Only the wealthy or the desperate adopted early. Within a decade, the cellular phone would shrink from a car-mounted luxury to a pocket-sized necessity. Analog gave way to digital. Motorola, Nokia, and eventually Apple and Samsung would build global empires on the technology. By 2020, there were more than 8 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide, exceeding the planet's population. The Chicago launch was the moment when communication untethered itself from fixed locations. Everything that followed, texting, mobile internet, smartphones, social media on the go, began with a few cell towers in the Midwest and a phone call that cost more per minute than most people earned per hour.