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movements reached a crescendo, there was a reversal of official attitudes. Room was earmarked in the higher end of the radio frequency spectrum for an experiment in cellular telephony, and the radio and electronics industry was invited to respond. Only Bell Laboratories, the research wing of AT&T, replied by the deadline of December 1971. By 1974, the FCC had decided exactly which frequencies theexperiment should use; by then Bell had cracked on with the design and construction of equipment, trying it out at the Cellular Test Bed, built near Newark, New Jersey.
    In March 1977, the FCC authorised Illinois Bell, the AT&T operating company for Chicago, to install the first cellular phone system. Ten base stations created the cells for an area covering 2,100 square miles around the Windy City. At Chicago’s Oak Park the central switch controlled the base stations and linked the system to the public telephone network. It went live in December 1978. By 1981 2,000 users – the maximum the system could handle – could each speak live from their car to Oak Park via the cellular network and from there, by the fixed wires, to any telephone in the United States. Other manufacturers followed. In 1980, a Motorola subsidiary, American Radio Telephone Service, began delayed trials in Baltimore and Washington. (Martin Cooper of Motorola had filed cellular patents as early as 1973.) In North Carolina, a small cellular company called Millicom adapted a phone made by the E.F. Johnson firm, producing the first portable cellular phone – for those with strong arms.
    These early systems convinced the FCC that cellular radio was practical, and should be deployed systematically across the United States. But the sheer scale of the country created problems that would not be encountered, as we shall see, in Europe. It was clearly beyond theresources of any company – except one – to install the base stations, switching centres and marketing operations throughout the United States, from coast to coast, necessary for a national cellular phone system. The one exception was the giant AT&T, the biggest corporation the world had ever seen. But by the early 1980s AT&T was under severe attack from those who would oppose monopolies, leading eventually to the breakup of the Bell System in 1984. Monolithic corporations were not welcome to apply. Moreover, America is made up of an archipelago of cities, with great stretches of rural land in between. The FCC decided it made sense to grant cellular licences by auction on a city-by-city basis, the so-called Metropolitan Statistical Areas (any county with both a total population of more than 100,000 and at least one town with more than 50,000), a format that invited the Bell regional operators – and, after 1 January 1984, the ‘baby Bells’, such as Southwestern Bell, Bell Atlantic, Pacific Telesis (Pactel), Ameritech, Bell South, US West and Nynex – to apply independently. In each area, to encourage competition,
two
cellular licences were up for grabs. One would typically go to the local Bell, while the other went to a new company. As part of the deal, AT&T set up a subsidiary, kept at arm’s length to satisfy the regulators, called Advanced Mobile Phone Service.
    The auction of the 90 largest metropolitan areas provoked hysteria. So many applications had flooded inby the June 1982 deadline that the hasty FCC decided that, after awards for the top 30 cities had been made, the other metropolitan licences would go by lottery. This meant that any chancer could land a ten-year licence, and then hawk it around more competent operators. The story was repeated when licences for the less lucrative remaining metropolitan areas and the Rural Statistical Areas were decided by lottery between 1984 and 1989. The last 180 metropolitan area licences attracted 92,000 applications. The end result was that cellular America was extremely disjointed. Each town or city had a different