Wireless telephony belonged more to the world of engineering ambition than to everyday life, and researchers had demonstrated that mobile communication was technically possible, but building a system capable of reliably serving large numbers of people was a far more difficult challenge. That changed in 1983 when the first commercial cellular network in the United States began operation, marking a shift from experimental technology to public service.
Histories of telecommunications published by George Mason University, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and researchers studying the development of cellular systems all describe the early 1980s as the period when mobile communication stopped being a promising concept and began to enter the real world.
The significance of the moment was not that the first wireless call had been made, but that an entire network now existed to support many calls from many people at once.
