Cellular radio and cordless telephony have demonstrated the demand for wireless communications and provided a foundation for the development of future wireless telecommunications systems and services.
Jay E. Padgett, Christoph G. Giinther, Takeshi Hattori · 1995
his century has seen the develapment ofapublicwireline networkthat allows reliable and affordable communication ofvoice and low-rate data around the globe. There also is multiplicity of specialized wired networks optimized for purposes such as the local communication of high-speed data. The goal of wireless communication is to allow the user access to the capabilities of the global network at any time without regard to location or mobility. Cellular and cordless telephony, both of which have gained widespread user acceptance during the last ten years, have begun this process but do not yet allow totalwireless communication. Cellularsystems currently are limited to voice and low-speed datawithinareascovcrcdbybasestations.Thebasic cordless telephone provides a wireless counterpart to the standard telephone. The handset typically operates within 50 to 100 m of the user’s base station, which connects to the public switched tclephone network (PSTN). With the advent of digital cordless telephony, cordless “systcms” with enhanced functionality (CT2, DECT, PHs) have been dcveloped that can support higher data rates and more sophisticated applications such as wireless private branch exchanges (PBXs) and public-access Telepoint systems. This article presents an overview of the current stateofwirelesscommunications,includingrelevant ongoing activities in technology development, standards, and spectrum allocation. The next three sections discuss cellular radio, cordless telephony, and wireless data systems, respectiveiy. Following that, ongoingandplannedfuturedevelopmentsaresummarized. The presentation here is oriented toward broadcoverageratherthan technicaldepth. Howcver, brief discussions of the air interfacesfor existingdigita1 ccllular and digital cordless systemsare provided, because the air interface bears heavily on system capacity and the environments in which the systemcanbeused,aswellasonthecostandcomplexity oftheequipment.Moredetaileddiscussionsontopics of interest to the reader, including networkaspects, can be found in other papers in this issue as well as in the references provided here. Cellular