Daniel Bliss is a professor of electrical engineering at Arizona State University and the director of the Center for Wireless Information Systems and Computational Architecture. In this interview, he explains the ideas behind the original cellular networks and how they evolved over the years into today's 5G (fifth generation) and even 6G (sixth generation) networks.
Q: How did wireless phones work before cellular technology?
A: The idea of wireless communications is quite old. Famously, the Marconi system could talk all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. It would have one system, which was the size of a building, talking to another system, which was the size of a building. But in essence, it just made a radio link between the two. Eventually people realized that's a really useful capability. So they put up a radio system, say at a high point in the city, and then everybody - well, those few who had the right kind of radio system - talked to that high point. So if you like, there was only one cell - it wasn't cellular in any sense. But because the amount of data you can send over time is a function of how far away you are, you want to get these things closer together. And so that's the the invention of the cellular system.