AT&T Archives: Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS), a 1978 film on cell phones

For more from the AT&T Archives, visit http://techchannel.att.com/archives Using simple graphics, this film, made in 1978, illustrates the concept of cellular telephony in easily-understood terms, which are instructive even today, since the basic idea of dividing a service area into a pattern of small cells remains the same. As the film points out, the concept of using these small cells was developed at Bell Labs, and it was this idea that constituted the giant leap from earlier, less efficient mobile phone systems to today's modern cell service. What the film does not mention: the year the cellular idea was first proposed at the Labs, which was 1947. In 1946, AT&T had introduced the first commercial mobile telephone service in St. Louis, Missouri. The equipment weighed nearly 80 pounds and was installed in a subscriber's motor vehicle. A single transmitter on a central tower provided service to the entire area, and only a handful of channels had to be shared by all subscribers. Bef