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Ross recalls, “Kelly set up Sandia Labs, which was run by AT&T, managed by us, and whenever I asked, ‘Why do we stay with this damn thing, it’s not our line of business,’ the answer was, ‘It helps us if we get into an antitrust suit.’ And Bell Labs did work on military programs. Why? Not really to make money. It was part of being invaluable.” But being invaluable to the Department of Defense was not necessarily the same as being invaluable to the Department of Justice or the Federal Communications Commission.
At the same time, a variety of independent manufacturers had won the right, granted by the FCC, to connect their equipment, such as office switchboards, into Ma Bell’s precious network.
The company was known as Microwave Communications Inc., but was better known as MCI.
In 1971 the FCC commissioners maintained that AT&T had to connect MCI’s long-distance microwave network into its local switching centers.
It was an argument like the one a gifted child might make in favor of preserving his parents’ marriage.
He did not seem to grasp, however, how quickly technology could now be replicated, in part thanks to Bell Labs’ widely available patents.
They didn’t realize at the time that anyone could build a network.
(Usually they relied on a combination of gallium and arsenic.)
The cladding must have what’s known as a smaller refractive index than the core glass.
Essentially, the light waves were reflected off the walls of the core glass as they moved forward.
The difference in the refractive index of water and air makes the surface appear like a mirror.
When a fiber shows too much “absorption,” it means that too much light is being lost thanks to traces of impurities—metals such as nickel and iron—within the glass.
A more complicated phenomenon, scattering often arises from imperfections—infinitesimal bubbles or cracks, for instance—in the glass crystal itself.
At the time, a caller couldn’t dial directly from a mobile telephone into what was known at AT&T as “the switched network.”
Meanwhile, Motorola, a small company out of Chicago, built a rugged “handie-talkie” for soldiers.
The main shortcoming, however, was that the Federal Communications Commission had made only a narrow portion of the radio spectrum—a portion just above the frequency of FM radio—available for mobile telephone service. The narrow spectrum meant there were only a few channels available to make calls. In all of Manhattan, fewer than a dozen people could use their car phones at any one time.
In 1947 AT&T began to petition the FCC for more spectrum in what was known as the ultra-high-frequency, or UHF, range.
than continue with the idea of placing a single high-powered antenna in a city center, there might be an advantage in spreading a multitude of low-powered antennas over a wider area to service mobile phones.
If the FCC allowed a block of frequencies to be used for mobile radio channels, Bell Labs could cut that block into, say, five slices. It could then assign a different slice to each of five hexagons in the honeycomb. This would help minimize interference and increase capacity, since the hexagon next door to the first hexagon would have a different slice of frequencies—and when you drove from one hexagon to another your phone would automatically switch frequencies.
That was feasible since the distance now precluded any interference. Once the pattern was repeated, it could be repeated again in the neighboring area of hexagons. And the pattern could effectively go on forever. The capacity for mobile calling would be far larger than what presently existed. Mobile radio didn’t have to be local. It could be national.
Those hexagons were cells.
In the late 1950s, the commissioners awarded a large block of radio frequencies to television broadcasters.
Had it been given to cellular service instead, which requires less bandwidth than TV, the same block of spectrum could have created thousands of new phone channels. (Each channel, in turn, could serve many mobile phone users.) It was a decision that maddened John Pierce, who was a fierce advocate for mobile radio and believed that wireless phones would someday be small and portable, like a transistor radio.
Pierce, in any event, wryly observed that “the FCC has decided pretty clearly that what the American people want is mass communication rather than individual communication.”
Apparently the commission was disappointed with the lackluster content and low popularity of UHF television.
He placed the building’s long connecting hallways on its glassy perimeter, with the windowless offices and labs in the interior.
But by Frenkiel’s own account, he soon came to realize that he had joined an organization that differed from its myth.
More to the point, the thrust of the work at Bell Labs seemed to have shifted decisively to big projects involving hundreds of people. Frenkiel’s Bell Labs didn’t seem to have anything to do with heroic research on a new amplifier, done by a few men in a hushed lab. It was about large teams attacking knotty problems for years on end. Jim Fisk’s 1947 dinner party—the Bell Labs of Kelly and Pierce and Shockley, “an ancient place of grainy and fading photographs,” as Frenkiel later viewed it, “where giants of science produced their individual monuments and left behind their personal legends”—was
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They knew every cell would need to be served by what they called “base station” antennas. These antennas would (1) transmit and receive the signals from the mobile phones and (2) feed those signals, by cable, into a switching center that was connected to the nationwide Bell System.
Base station antennas would be expensive. How few could they install and still have a high-functioning system?
The second was, How could you “split” a cell?
As a mobile telephone user moved around, how could you switch the call from one antenna to another—from cell to cell, in other words—without causing great distraction to the caller?
The Metroliner route was divided into cells of different frequencies. Markers were put on the tracks—coils, actually—that could be tripped by the train as it passed; these signaled that a call had to be handed off from one cell, and one frequency, to another.
It was Engel’s understanding that to get ahead at Bell Labs, “you were supposed to work on more than you were asked to work on.”6 It was necessary, in other words, not only to do your assigned work but to devote 20 or 30 percent of your time to another project.
A trucking service, for instance, could boost its efficiency with a fleet of phones in its vehicles. Increased productivity would justify the cost of the phones.
Porter, Frenkiel, and Engel estimated that it would take about three years to deliver a cellular plan, which turned out to be correct.
The thing about Bell Labs, Frenkiel remarks, was that it could spend millions of dollars—or even $100 million, which was what AT&T would spend on cellular before it went to market7—on a technology that offered little guarantee it would succeed technologically or economically.
Though Engel didn’t perceive it at the time, he later came to believe that marketing studies could only tell you something about the demand for products that actually exist.
A Picturephone was only valuable if everyone else had a Picturephone. But cellular users didn’t only talk to other cellular users. They could talk to anyone in the national or global network. The only difference was that they could move.
This term refers to the Scottish engineer James Watt, the inventor of the first commercially popular steam engine, whose name is also memorialized in the term we use to measure power. In the late 1700s, Watt made startling improvements upon more basic ideas of how to use compressed steam to run heavy machinery. The knowledge needed to make such an engine had by then coalesced to the point that his innovation was, arguably, inevitable.
It was now just a matter of who was going to do it, and how fast they could make it work.
“Cellular is a computer technology,” Frenkiel points out. “It’s not a radio technology.” In other words, engineering the transmission and reception from a mobile handset to the local antennas, while challenging, wasn’t what made the idea innovative. It was the system’s logic—locating a user moving through the cellular honeycomb, monitoring the signal strength of that call, and handing off a call to a new channel, and a new antenna tower, as a caller moves along.
And then, as the cellular team at Bell Labs began working on its FCC proposal, a Santa Clara, California, semiconductor company named Intel—formed by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, both refugees from Bill Shockley’s first semiconductor company—began producing a revolutionary integrated circuit called the 4004 microprocessor. Measuring only one-eighth by one-sixteenth of an inch, and containing 2,300 transistors, the 4004 was essentially a tiny, powerful computer.
What also made cellular possible were the phone network’s new electronic switching stations, or ESSs.
A cellular phone would need to send a digital signal every few seconds to the nearest base station antenna.
If another base station had a stronger signal, the computerized system would hand the call off to the next cell. The catch was that before a call could be handed off, the switching system had to identify a channel in the new cell, set up that call, and send a message to the mobile so it could switch frequencies.
“But it’s sitting there and it’s got the ability to be programmed for something no one ever expected it to do—all those instantaneous decisions that were never necessary. And now we come along to say we need to do locating and handoffs. And also, by the way, we need to keep track of the health of every base station in the system, we need trouble reports, we need to gather data for traffic.” The ESS—a switching system with a powerful computer embedded within it—could do all these things.
Systems engineers consider all the standards and technologies and economics necessary to make a project work. They worry, moreover, about how to integrate a complex new technology with the rest of the system. Cellular phones were an ideal case, since the new technology had to (1) work, (2) work affordably, and (3) work seamlessly with the rest of the existing phone network. What the systems people couldn’t do was actually make those projects function the way they dreamed.
Claude Shannon had philosophized about this, but to radio engineers in the field, noise is a slightly different phenomenon. You think about noise not so much as an idea that interrupts a message containing information. You think about noise as clicks and static and fadeouts—a physical or electrical problem that must be overcome by engineering or by savvy.
He was not the sort of Ivy League type that clogged the hallways of the Murray Hill research labs. Rather, he was an engineer’s engineer, who had gone to a local New York City school and had attended “Kelly College,” the Labs’ continuing education program.
