iPosi Celebrates 50th Anniversary of First Cellphone Call with Inventor of First Portable Cellphone Marty Cooper at Tech Talk Presentation

iPosi CEO Rich Lee (left) holding The Brick with Marty Cooper, Inventor of the First Cellphone

Wireless Innovation Forum Hosts Technology Roundtable Discussion on the Future of Wireless Technology 

 

(Denver, CO) – April 3, 2023 – Rich Lee, CEO of iPosi, co-moderated a Wireless Innovation Forum (WinnForum) panel discussion on the Future of Wireless Technology in honor of the April 3rd 50th anniversary of the first cellphone call with Motorola Engineer Marty Cooper, inventor of the cellphone, and Google Wireless Engineer and WinnForum CTO Andrew Clegg. With an international industry audience in attendance, the three technology leaders looked back on how the cellphone has impacted society. Marty shared his insights on how new innovations in mobile intelligence and sensing will impact improvements in health care, food security, and education.

Born from the Motorola advances in commercial radio technology, including 1950s car phones and pagers, the portable cellphone is considered to be one in the top 100 inventions of all time. It took 13 weeks for Marty and his design team to develop the first hand-held telephone prototype—the DynaTAC 8000 (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage)—which was affectionately known as “The Brick” because of its size and shape. Motorola made the device commercially available in 1983 for $3,995, but the price quickly fell as new versions and ultimately new models were designed.

“It had 25 minutes of battery life, which was not a problem because you couldn’t hold it up for that long it was so heavy!” Marty said.

With six billion current cellular subscribers worldwide or 65% of the global population, the cellphone’s impact is unmistakable, from E911 calls that have saved tens of millions of lives to powering a global trillion-dollar eCommerce economy.

“What we did 50 years ago was an introduction . . . but the future is going to teach us some important lessons,” Marty observed. “We are at the very beginning of the cellphone revolution.”

When asked what he thinks the cellphone revolution will look like 20 or 30 years from now, Marty shared his vision for education, health care, and poverty.

Cellular Technology’s Impact on Education 

With most of the global population now carrying these mini super computers, [only] “having a teacher giving facts to a student is a waste of time,” Marty said. Anecdotally citing his three great-grandchildren who have cellphones, he added, “We’re going to have to teach our children how to use information, how to discriminate between good and bad information. If we do that, we will improve the educational experience. Our children will be smarter, and they’ll have a much better head start.”

Intercepting Disease Before It Happens

“We put all this effort into curing diseases. The right way is to intercept disease before it happens. We already have sensors that can measure virtually everything in the human body,” Marty said. “It may take two generations before we can detect a cancer cell in the making, but it won’t be long before we have the ability to do that. Can you imagine a society that is free from [that] disease?”

Eliminating Food Shortages

“We have enough food in the world to feed everybody. There is no reason for anyone to be hungry. And yet we haven’t figured out how to distribute that food. We have the potential for the cell phone combined with the internet combined with other technologies to eliminate hunger,” Marty predicted.

Is There Enough Wireless Spectrum?

“There’s never been a scarcity of spectrum, but we are going to have to do things differently,” Marty continued. “We know there are things for improving spectrum capacity. Smart antennas, for example, which will multiply the effects of the spectrum.”  Also, “iPosi has a technology that has created in essence a topological picture of the [radio electrospace] world showing where coverage and interference avoidance can be improved.”

To view the March 16th WinnForum roundtable, visit Tech Talk Celebrating 50 Years of Cellular with Martin Cooper, Creator of the First Cellphone – YouTube.

For information about iPosi go to iposi.com. For information about WinnForum visit wirelessinnovation.org.

About iPosi 

Meeting the growing demand for precise, jam-resistant, indoor time synchronization, and mobile and fixed device indoor positioning, iPosi maximizes spectrum efficiency by locating incoming and outgoing mobile and fixed device signals to free up spectrum space for commercial uses while protecting legacy services. iPosi’s advanced embedded technology enables instantaneous positioning, accurately locating devices deep inside urban canyons or anywhere GPS and GNSS signals are at their weakest using conventional solutions.

 

 

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