Making a phone call on a mobile phone required the assistance of a live operator

Without modern technology, the process of making a call and receiving one was handled differently back then. When a call was placed to and from a mobile phone, a long distance operator had to make the connection. Conversations were sent through a combination of radio signals and telephone lines. Interestingly, you might note that the radio signals used Frequency Modulation known these days as FM. While consumers were listening to AM radio in those days, it would be several years before teens were listening to Led Zepplin on their FM radios.

As the film notes “In order to reach vehicles traveling the highways between cities, a number of transmitting and receiving stations connected to telephone lines are spaced at intervals along the highway so that one will always be in range of the moving vehicle.” Back then, the high-frequency antennas used for this service were placed on high ground because they needed to maintain a line of sight with the antenna on the vehicle.

“The mobile telephone greatly expands the scope of voice communications,” Bell Telephone said on the film adding that it is “one more step for telephone service for anyone, anytime, anywhere.” According to one person who left a comment on YouTube, this film appears to be from 1948 when AT&T was beginning to offer Mobile Telephone Service to the largest areas of the country. Apparently, this technology was not much different than the two-way communications system used by the police at the time. There were two different services called “Urban” and “Highway” with the former used within 25 miles of a major city. The “Urban” service used signals in the high band 152/158 MHz frequencies while the “Highway” service, which was used in the rest of the country, relied on low band 35/43 MHz frequencies. Today, T-Mobile’s low-band 5G service employs low-band 600MHz spectrum and its mmWave airwaves are in the 28GHz/39GHz frequencies.

While the film shows what might have passed for cutting-edge technology back in the day, it should make you appreciate how much easier we have it today. These days, touchscreen phones that fit in our pockets allow us to make calls, go online, take pictures/video, listen to and view streaming content and communicate through text messaging. Back in 1948, no one could have predicted what mobile telephony would be like in 2020. Today, we can’t even fathom what mobile communications will look like in 2092.