Mobiles
It seems hard to remember when mobile phones
weren't everywhere - today even children at school seem
to have them, but it wasn’t that long ago that news
programmes showed ‘yuppies’ talking into a
brick shouting “BUY! SELL!”
In fact the earliest mobile telephones
date back to the early 1900s,
but it wasn’t until the late 1970s
that commercial services began. These 1st generation
phones, as they are now called, transmitted and received
analogue radio waves. But, like almost everything else,
by the mid to late 1980s
there was a move to digital technology, which brought
two key benefits; capacity and security.
Unlike the
digital, or 2nd generation, mobile phones, reception
of the older analogue mobile phone signals was relatively
easy. Not only did this make it easy for others to listen
in on your calls, it was possible for the handset identification
number to be picked up and used to create ‘clones’
- mobile handsets with the same identification number
as the cloned phone. Usually the first the owner would
know of this would be when they received a huge bill
for calls they didn’t make.
|
