This week is the 25th anniversary of the first mobile phone call ever made in America. According to US trade association the CTIA, the first mobile phone call in the US was made on 13th October 1983. The president of Ameritech Mobile Communications made the call to the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell.
The call, which took place between America and Germany, launched America`s first citywide commercial cellular system, supported by the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. This early portable handset was 13 inches long and weighed nearly two pounds. Its owner would have been able to use it for a maximum of 30 minutes at a time.
The very first mobile phone to be invented was the Nokia Mobira Senator 450: it weighed almost 10 kilos.
The CTIA reports there are now more than 262 million wireless subscribers in the USA - that`s about 83 per cent of the country`s total population.
Informa Telecoms & Media, which analyses the mobile communications industry and founded the website telecoms.com, estimate there will be four billion mobile subscriptions worldwide by the end of this year.
According to Informa, what`s even more astonishing is that, assuming that the world`s four billionth mobile subscription is activated during the fourth quarter, the last billion subscriptions will have been achieved in just five full quarters.