Those involved in the launch of the first
U.S. cellular network recall its trials and tribulations.

It was a cold October day at Chicago’s Soldier Field but the sky was cobalt blue. The dignitaries wore their wool topcoats against the chilly wind that made the temperature feel like freezing. And Scott Erickson remembers the car wouldn’t start.

Ameritech was Scott Erickson’s customer.

Erickson was working for AT&T on that day, Oct. 13, 1983, helping with the festivities at Soldier Field that would launch the first commercial mobile phone service in the United States.

John “Jack” Brickhouse, the Chicago sportscaster, was the master of ceremonies, with the central event the first phone call placed on that network. Bob Barnett, then president of the new Ameritech Mobile Communications, sat in a car outside Soldier Field and made the call to the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, who was in Berlin.

Barnett was in the car because mobile phones then were car phones, huge things sitting in the trunks of cars. The phones were so heavy – as much as 200 pounds – that Erickson remembers every time he drove over a railroad track his Datsun 200ZX would bottom out.

Erickson was then a field engineer with AT&T’s Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) division and Ameritech, still one of the Baby Bells before the breakup in 1984, was his customer. As part of the festivities, Erickson recalled, there was a contest for the first customers. The customers would run across the parking lot to one of four or five cars that had phones installed in their trunks. Whichever customer could make the first call would get free service.

That’s when the dead car battery was discovered. Engineers had been testing the phones in the cars so much that the battery was dead in one of the cars. It just so happened to be the car that first customer selected.

“The person who went to the first car couldn’t call because the battery was dead,” Erickson said. “They had to put jumper cables on so the phone would work. We thought we’d all be fired.”

Erickson also recalled that the grandstands set up for the audience outside Soldier Field had to be moved the day before the event. The grandstand was moved about 30 feet so the cellular signal to the car phones would be picked up better.

Despite the dead battery and the cold wind, though, Erickson said that commercial launch “was a lot of fun. It really went very well. Those of us who had been going to weekly meetings [for six months or more] deciding if it was a ‘go or no-go’ felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment. We were all high-fiving and hugging.”

The original Hickory Hills Mobile Switching Center just outside of Chicago was the central switch location for the first cellular switching center.

TRIAL SYSTEM
Erickson had been working on Chicago’s trial system, operated by Illinois Bell, since 1978 and full-time since 1982, helping install cell sites in the Chicago area. “I realized then that I was going to be part of something special,” he said.

The trial system had about 2,000 customers and seven cell sites, with the towers 150 to 300 feet high and broadcasting signals at 100 watts. The original plan was to have 17 cell sites operational for the commercial launch but zoning issues meant Ameritech initially had to go with 13.

In the weeks ahead of the launch, Erickson drive-tested the system in his Datsun. People who saw the antenna mounted on his car would point at him and ask him if he had a car phone.

Mal Gurian saw the launch from a different angle, as head of OKI Advanced Communications in the United States. OKI and Motorola made the first phones for the Ameritech network. Barnett used an OKI CS-1 phone to make that first call.

OKI Advanced Communications, a subsidiary of OKI Electric Industry Company of Japan, had been working with Bell Labs, AT&T, Western Electric and others on mobile phones since the early 1970s, Gurian said.

The original CS-1 was made in Japan and Gurian said it was the first mobile phone type-accepted by the FCC. OKI also decided to build a robotic manufacturing plant for phones in Norcross, Ga., which opened in 1985. Those commercial first phones operated at 3 watts.

OKI also came out with a briefcase phone and a “visor” phone, so named because it fit on a car’s visor. OKI closed the plant about 1990 as well as its U.S. operations, Gurian said.

Martin Cooper placed an early phone call from New York streets.Cooper helped design the first Motorola phones.

Marty Cooper, who helped design the first Motorola phones and is credited with making the first public call from a portable cell phone in 1973, said few people knew how complex cellular technology was then and how long it would take to bring portable phones to market.

Also, Cooper said, government decisions on technology and spectrum affected how quickly commercial systems could launch. Both Japan and Norway had commercial mobile phone systems prior to the United States, but that was because those governments played a leading role while in the United States there was a more hands-off attitude. The FCC decided to have two licenses in each market, one going to the existing Baby Bell and one in a “beauty contest” selection process to a Radio Common Carrier.

Cooper’s wife, Arlene Harris, came from an RCC background in Los Angeles, where her father, Homer, owned and operated a system starting in 1952. Those common carrier networks were mobile but there was no handoff between base stations.

“I used my first mobile when I was 6,” Harris said, “and I started working the switchboard when I was 12.”

Arlene Harris was connecting calls before there were automated handoffs.

Her father’s network, ICS Communications, had two main base stations on top of mountains in the Los Angeles area. A physical switchboard was used initially because an operator had to connect the calls made from a car phone. ICS had four of the 12 RCC channels so only four calls could be made at a time. It wasn’t until the 1970s that an automated switch was used.

PORTABLE PHONES
Cooper said it was Motorola’s vision that mobile phones ultimately would escape the car. The company built four prototypes before coming up with the first commercial model that he used on April 3, 1983, to make the first portable phone call. That phone weighed about 2.5 pounds, was 10 inches high, 1.5 inches wide and 3 inches deep. The battery lasted 20 minutes.

Cooper also was involved in the second commercial cellular network launch, operated by American Radio Telephone Service in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore area. That network launched in December 1983. While the Chicago system was designed for car phones, ART wanted a portable phone system.

Dennis Strigl’s first job at Ameritech was to figure out why cellular wasn’t selling like it should. It was the network, he found out.

When Ameritech’s system went live in Chicago, Cooper had left Motorola but was still living in the Windy City.

“I don’t remember specifically what I was doing that day,” he said, “but it is not unlikely that I was in a shop in Chicago trying to get a mobile phone put in my car. You had to bring your car in and leave it for a day. As you can guess, there were long lines of people.”

Denny Strigl, now president and COO for Verizon Communications, was the man who took over for Barnett as president of Ameritech Mobile Communications. Strigl, who took the job in April 1984, remembered he was told when he took the job that “the service isn’t selling well. Your job is to go out and sell the service. People aren’t buying this, so get this thing really marketed.”

One month later, Strigl said, “I went back and said I couldn’t sell it because it doesn’t work.”

So, instead of selling the service, Strigl’s job became one of building out the network and making sure customers had good service. He and his chief technical officer spent many hours driving around Chicago, pressing the Send and End buttons on their equipment to test the signals.

“I will tell you honestly it was more likely that we couldn’t make the call, or within 30 seconds the call would drop,” he said. “It was critical that we build the service out as quickly as possible.”

Martin Cooper and his team at Motorola.

That “laser focus” on network quality never left Strigl, who kept that mantra when he later became president and CEO of Verizon Wireless. Strigl credits that focus and the benefits of competition for the success of cellular technology in the United States.

When Ameritech launched, the cost of a car phone was $2,995, the monthly service charge $50 and a call was priced at 40 cents per minute. A year and a half later, when another cellular operator entered the Chicago market, Strigl said he cut prices in half.

“I remember telling the Ameritech top brass what I had done and I almost lost my job,” he said. “But we had to do it to meet the competition.”

At the time, 25 years ago, Strigl said no one knew the success that cellular telecommunications would have. “But from the perspective of 2008, it has been a natural evolution.”

And, he added, “It’s been a lot of hard work on the part of manufacturers, the operators, the CTIA and the government.”