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US mobile phone service in the 1940s

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AlbertL:
This Bell System film shows how the system worked and the equipment used:


It looks like there were two variants: one had transmit-receive base stations spaced along major highways, while another, for city environments, had multiple receive-only base stations and a single centrally-located high-powered transmitter.

Note that the “highway” version faced the same challenge as modern cellular networks: when calling a mobile unit, the location of the unit had to be known accurately enough to select the nearest base station.  In this early system, the calling party had to supply that information to the operator, as the film shows when the dispatcher places a call to one of his trucks.     

I assume neither version had a provision for handoff from one base station to another.

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