There is a first for everything and that of course means there was a first mobile phone (or cellular) call! This month marked the Golden Anniversary (50 years) of the first ever call, made on 3 April 1973.
This amazing feat of technology development and ingenuity was first used by Marty Cooper. Whilst stood on a street corner in New York, he made the first call to his rival counterpart at Bell Laboratories to let him know that he was calling from “a personal, handheld, portable cell phone”.
It is easy to take for granted that our smartphones/supercomputers can also make phone calls. That first call made all those years ago is a prime example of the technology being ready, but where the infrastructure had to play catch up. Only then could it start to be made available to the general public. The cost of those early mobile devices was also very high and only worked in a limited number of places. To quote the article from the BBC:
“The commercial version of Marty Cooper’s prototype, the Motorola Dynatac 8000X, was released 11 years after that first call, in 1984. It would cost the equivalent of £9,500 ($11,700) if bought today…”
What About Mobile Test Calling?
Our early testing equipment (Buzzard) started making mobile test calls in 1991. Meaning that we have been generating mobile phone test calls for a whopping 32 years!
Since those first cellular calls were made we have been dedicated to the compliance testing of metering and billing accuracy around the world. As technology has advanced, so has our technology test equipment.
Whether you are interested in Revenue Assurance, Service Assurance or Regulatory Compliance our Test Call Generation tools are here to independently verify the telecom network.
Would you like to learn more? – talk to us, we can offer a quick ‘non-pushy’ chat just to see what you could test in even just a short period of time.
