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| Date: Thu, 21 May 2015 18:27:08 -0700 (PDT)
From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org>
To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Does anyone remember the IMTS System?
Message-ID: <70ffb861-25de-472d-a71e-5f35d57047a1@googlegroups.com>
On Thursday, May 21, 2015 at 7:43:36 PM UTC-4, Bill Horne wrote:
> Here's a trip down memory lane: does anyone remember the IMTS
> systems that preceded cellular?
In the early 1970s, a friend of mine worked for a VIP who had
a mobile phone in his car. My friend would call me or I would
call him on it occasionally. We kept our calls brief as it
was expensive.
Operationally, it worked like a regular telephone; the mobile set
had a rotary dial and a ringer.
Certain elite passenger trains, like the 20th Century Limited,
Broadway Limited, and Congressionals had on-board mobile
telephone service, though I believe it was the older manual type.
Metroliner service, introduced in 1969, had a modern on-board mobile
phone, with automatic handoff between radio bases, and Touch Tone
coin telephone sets. If memory serves, a call was priced at $3.00
for three minutes, high in its day, but not outrageous. (FWIW,
when I rode a Metroliner train in 1973, no one used the phone.)
> I find myself getting nostalgic
> for the "good old days" of the mobile world, and I wonder if
> any of that equipment has been converted to other uses.
One thing we must remember is that that service was actually
an automobile telephone--one could only use it in their car.
It seems that a great many cell phone users today would find
that restriction extremely limiting. (Ironically today,
such use while driving is illegal in some places.)
Also, the phone took up space, both the dashboard unit and a unit
in the trunk.
When cellular phones first came out, they were automobile-
oriented, and cell phone stores had a garage to physically
mount the phone in the car.
We also must remember that capacity was extremely limited,
there was room for only a few conversations at time. The
Bell System regularly sought more radio channels, but was
denied by the FCC.
>From the Bell Labs Switching history:
"The crossbar tandem system was used to serve these mobile
and other special service lines directly--a function it
could perform since it could receive and send dial pulses."
"Significant use of private mobile radio systems dates back to 1921,
beginning with the Detroit police department. Over the years, the
Federal Communications Commission has granted additional radio
spectra to increase private licenses to over eight million users (and
another eight million on CB). These systems for the most part do
not connect to the telephone network. Beginning in 1946, the Bell
System inaugurated a three-channel system in St. Louis. Over the
succeeding years, additional frequencies were allocated, improvements
were made in changing service from manual to automatic,
and trunking was added between mobile units and available channels.
However, only 143,000 customers are served by Bell and the
radio common carriers (RCC). There are tens of thousands of held
orders for carrier-connected mobile telephone systems, even though
the tariff is ten to twenty times that of residential telephone service.
Because the waiting time is so long, there are many others who need
this type of service but have not bothered to add themselves to the
waiting list."
[evolution to cell service]
"Since 1947, the Bell System has expressed to the Federal
Communications Commission, in a number of review dockets, its
interest in a large-scale mobile telephone system. In docket 19262,
Bell introduced in 1971 a new version of the cellular system, which
reuses a basic group of frequencies in nonadjacent hexagonal cells.
As the mobile unit roams from cell to cell, its connection is moved
from transceiver to transceiver under control of a central office
switching system. No. 1 ESS was chosen to be the mobile telephone
switching office (MTSO), since it has the software capability to allocate
cells and frequencies as a call is "handed off" from cell to cell.
In addition, the MTSO has to locate the cell for originations and provide
additional conveniences for mobile customers. Initially the
intent was to combine local and mobile services in the same switching
office. In 1975, the FCC gave the Bell System the go-ahead for a
development field trial of the cellular system but the switching
office would be limited to handling only calls to and from mobile
units. A No. 1 ESS, located in Oakbrook, Illinois was set up to
operate a few cells and mobile units. Success of the trial is expected
to lead to a larger service test and, with FCC approval, commercial
service. "
|
| Date: 22 May 2015 02:08:10 -0000
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Does anyone remember the IMTS System?
Message-ID: <20150522020810.72161.qmail@ary.lan>
>Here's a trip down memory lane: does anyone remember the IMTS
>systems that preceded cellular?
I went to a church camp on an island off the coast of New Hampshire
where for many years the only phone was an IMTS phone installed in a
phone booth in the lobby. To call in, you'd dial 0, ask for the
mobile operator in Dover NH, then ask the operator for JS8-3445. (The
phone had a dial but my recollection is that they never automated that
mobile site.) Calls were expensive and limited to three minutes.
When IMTS shut down one of the campers who was an engineer in real
life put an antenna on the roof with line of sight to a church steeple
on the mainland and set up a remote phone repeater, which gave us a
pair of normal phones with normal phone numbers, albeit somewhat hissy
sound. Since then I gather they arranged to run a cable to an
adjacent island where the Coast Goard had run a cable out to their
lighthouse from the mainland, and now they have not just phone but
Internet. The campers, of course, just use their cell phones to cell
sites on the mainland since radio waves propagate easily across salt
water.
R's,
John
|
| Date: Fri, 22 May 2015 01:08:50 -0400
From: tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net>
To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Does anyone remember the IMTS System?
Message-ID: <1a4std7tvpjaw$.ytgosxwlt25k.dlg@40tude.net>
On Thu, 21 May 2015 19:38:19 -0400 EDT, Bill Horne wrote:
> Here's a trip down memory lane: does anyone remember the IMTS
> systems that preceded cellular? I find myself getting nostalgic
> for the "good old days" of the mobile world, and I wonder if
> any of that equipment has been converted to other uses.
I can't say I "remember" it, but Google certainly responds to the IMTS bait
and offers this neat catch (amongst others)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improved_Mobile_Telephone_Service
for your delectation :-) . Cheers, -- tlvp
--
Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP.
|
| Date: Fri, 22 May 2015 22:30:53 +0000 (UTC)
From: danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com>
To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Does anyone remember the IMTS System?
Message-ID: <mjoamt$hdb$1@reader1.panix.com>
[snip]
They were, of course, Expensive Toys for the Rich and Famous.
As such, in the tv show Superman (the real one in the 1950s,
accept no imitiation), Perrry White had one. None of the
reporters or other staffers did..
--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
|
| Date: Fri, 22 May 2015 10:02:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org>
To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Philadelphia picks vendor for mobile-payment parking system
Message-ID: <485d861c-c73f-4fdd-b929-cd9ab93d2af8@googlegroups.com>
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the PPA selected Pango USA to
create a parking mobile-payment system that will allow users to pay by
using a PPA smartphone app, visiting a PPA website, or calling an
interactive voice system. The app will include an option for users to
add time to a meter that is about to expire, with an increasing rate
each time. The app can send reminders to motorists that their paid
time is about to expire.
For full article please see:
http://www.philly.com/philly/business/transportation/20150522_PPA_picks_vendor_for_mobile_parking_app.html
|
| Date: Fri, 22 May 2015 18:42:01 -0700 (PDT)
From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org>
To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Norman Lear and the telephone conference operator
Message-ID: <84d7ff22-f8c9-4685-b57a-f8fd2ca71abe@googlegroups.com>
Televison producer Norman Lear (All in the Family, Maude, etc) wrote
a memoir, "Even This I Get to Experience" (Penguin Press, 2014). He
included a passage about Mary, a conference call telephone operator
(page 159).
In 1953, he was living in New York City, and getting a divorce from
his wife, who lived in Los Angeles. It was necessary for him to
have very expensive long distance conference calls which included
combinations of his daughter, accountant, attorney, his wife's
accountant and attorney, and others. Lear wrote:
"One day I'd just hung up after a conference call when the
phone rang again. It was the conference operator, inquiring as
to whether my call was properly completed. She then stunned me
by asking if I had talked with my daughter in L.A. that day. It
seemed that she'd heard me talk about my daughter on a conference
call the other day and was touched by the idea that we talked
daily. And then she wondered if I would like her to get my
daughter on the phone for me the next day. Thus began a four-year
relationship that saw Mary--she would never reveal her last name--
become an integral member of the extended Lear clan, placing just
about all of their long distance phone calls from that point on,
gratis.
"Over time I teased out Mary's story. She was a girl from a poor
South Boston family who'd gotten a job with the phone company.
She was in her early twenties when, reporting to work, she fell
on ice at the building and sustained a serious injury that
confined her to a wheelchair. The settlement her family
negotiated was not a payoff but lifetime employment as a
conference operator. With the latitude that accompanied her
special circumstance, Mary sat unsupervised with the means to
connect people anywhere to people everywhere, while also
allowing her to listen in on--and live vicariously through--
a lot of lives.
"She certainly seemed to revel in mine as it unfolded in front
of her. Whether it was the attorney-client discussions that
shaped my career, family matters and crises across the board,
every aspect of my divorce, the fresh relationships, Mary was
involved in all of it. It never troubled any of us that Mary
was eavesdropping, or that we were using the phone company's
services without paying for them."
|
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