Could the cellphone industry have taken off 4 decades earlier?

According to this article by Reason(some skepticism is due given their libertarian agenda):

When AT&T wanted to start developing cellular in 1947, the FCC rejected the idea, believing that spectrum could be best used by other services that were not "in the nature of convenience or luxury." This view—that this would be a niche service for a tiny user base—persisted well into the 1980s. "Land mobile," the generic category that covered cellular, was far down on the FCC's list of priorities. In 1949, it was assigned just 4.7 percent of the spectrum in the relevant range. Broadcast TV was allotted 59.2 percent, and government uses got one-quarter.

Television broadcasting had become the FCC's mission, and land mobile was a lark. Yet Americans could have enjoyed all the broadcasts they would watch in, say, 1960 and had cellular phone service too. Instead, TV was allocated far more bandwidth than it ever used, with enormous deserts of vacant television assignments—a vast wasteland, if you will—blocking mobile wireless for more than a generation.

How empty was this spectrum? Across America's 210 television markets, the 81 channels originally allocated to TV created some 17,010 slots for stations. From this, the FCC planned in 1952 to authorize 2,002 TV stations. By 1962, just 603 were broadcasting in the United States. Yet broadcasters vigorously defended the idle bandwidth. When mobile telephone advocates tried to gain access to the lightly used ultra-high frequency (UHF) band, the broadcasters deluged the commission, arguing ferociously and relentlessly that mobile telephone service was an inefficient use of spectrum.

It may seem surprising that they were so determined to preserve those vacant frequencies. Given that commercial TV station licenses were severely limited—enough to support only three national networks—they might have seen the scores of unused channels as a threat. What if policy makers got serious about increasing competition? Shrinking the TV band by slicing off chunks for mobile phone services could have protected incumbent broadcasters from future television competitors. Why, then, did they oppose it?

The answer: The broadcasters believed they held sufficient veto power to prevent the prospect of competing stations. Meanwhile, they cherished the option value of unused spectrum. This thinking proved prescient: Years later, unoccupied TV frequencies would be awarded to the incumbent broadcasters, without payment, during the transition to digital television.

To be sure an ATL early cellphone industry in the 1940s and 50s would have been selling a less sophisticated product then what was sold in the 80s and 90s OTL. OTOH, assuming these early cellphones are useful enough to capture a large market share, there'd likely be greater funding for R&D in the sector. I'm doubtful that this would mean we'd see iPhone equivalents 40 years earlier or even 20 years earlier... but there'd surely be some degree of acceleration*? Also, potentially knockoff benefits in adjacent sectors.

*Although that might partly take the form of "dead ends" that would be useful given the technological limits of the time but rendered redundant by the opportunities raised by latter innovations.
 
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Wallet

Banned
Interesting concept. Considering most Americans didn't even have a landline phone in their homes in the 1940s cell phones could potentially be more common sooner.
 
I am by no means a technical expert on cellular technology, but I find the claim far-fetched. The hard part of analog cellular isn't the actual transmitting, which is simple radio. It's in the switching between cells and that takes computing power that wasn't there until the 80s. Old style car phones existed as early as the 60s (perhaps earlier, I'm not sure) but it was an operator assisted radio connection. Widespread cellular got rid of the operator and automated everything and moved from a central radio connection to multiple low-power cells. 1947 was the year the transistor was invented, a necessary precursor to all of this. All in all, it might have gotten you an extra decade at most -- putting the first cell networks in the early to mid 1970s. Maybe, if the prospect drove the necessary innovation in computing and batteries. I read this article independently from the post earlier this week and it seemed more an attempt to make an ideological argument than a scientific one.
 
I am by no means a technical expert on cellular technology, but I find the claim far-fetched. The hard part of analog cellular isn't the actual transmitting, which is simple radio. It's in the switching between cells and that takes computing power that wasn't there until the 80s. Old style car phones existed as early as the 60s (perhaps earlier, I'm not sure) but it was an operator assisted radio connection. Widespread cellular got rid of the operator and automated everything and moved from a central radio connection to multiple low-power cells. 1947 was the year the transistor was invented, a necessary precursor to all of this. All in all, it might have gotten you an extra decade at most -- putting the first cell networks in the early to mid 1970s. Maybe, if the prospect drove the necessary innovation in computing and batteries. I read this article independently from the post earlier this week and it seemed more an attempt to make an ideological argument than a scientific one.
I was suspicious that it sounded too good to be true...

Still, even just a decade earlier should have some interesting ramifications.
 
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