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operator, often very local. New companies such as Chattanooga Cellular Telephone, Fresno Cellular Telephone and Long Beach Cellular Telephone served just their local constituency. Roaming, the ability to use your cellphone in different systems, for example to go from San Francisco to Los Angeles and make calls in both cities, was made extremely difficult.
    The disjointed pattern was slowly reversed as the industry consolidated. Firms with licences were bought or merged. By 1992, the largest operator, McCaw, had bought out LIN Broadcasting and 90 other licences, to serve a total population of over 65 million people. Two years later McCaw was bought by AT&T – monopolising forces were creeping back. But by then the FCC’s management of the licensing process had created a distinctive national cellular style, a crazy-paving of licencescovering the country, and had done so slowly. As Garry A. Garrard concluded in an analysis of this licensing phase, the United States had ‘spent four years awarding its cellular licences for major markets alone, and seven years in total which, when combined with the initial delay in authorising any cellular service at all, gave other countries the chance to catch up on, and overtake, the technical lead originally provided to the US by AT&T.’
    We will see very soon what other countries were doing to overtake the American lead. But first let’s sum up developments so far. Both the concept and first working examples of cellular telephony emerged in the United States, albeit with decades separating the two. The most important factors shaping developments were the existence of the world’s greatest electronics-based company, AT&T,
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at the same time hostility to its monopolistic tendencies. The result was innovation, but in a disjointed form, with many small cellular companies rather than one large one. Nor was there a lot of competition, since different companies were restricted to different cities. But there was one standard, called AMPS, after the AT&T subsidiary that gave it its name. This standard dictated how a ‘terminal’ (the mobile) would communicate with the base stations. We will soon see other standards that would compete with AMPS in the wider world.
    If there was a distinct pattern of cellular infrastructure in the United States, there was also a distinctpattern of American cellphone use. Unlike in Europe or Japan, the owner of a mobile phone was charged for accepting an incoming call. This made owners reluctant to give away their mobile phone number to all and sundry, and had the effect of making mobile phones a device for business or emergencies only, and not for chat. The relatively sophisticated – and expensive – cellphone also had to compete with pagers and beepers, which were already very popular with Americans. When I stepped off the plane at Baltimore airport in the 1990s the effect, for me, was obvious to see: while in London the mobile was ubiquitous as the prime means of keeping in everyday conversational touch with friends and work contacts alike, on the other side of the Atlantic it was hard to spot a mobile being used, and if it was the call was brief and businesslike. This difference forms the foundation of a quite distinct mobile culture in America compared to Europe or Japan.
    Finally, there was also a difference emerging in the material design and styling of American phones. For decades, Motorola had led the way in car phones. In early 1984, the company introduced the first hand-portable cellular phone, the Motorola 8000, although since it weighed only slightly less than a pack of sugar, this black brick-sized device was not easy on the elbow. It was hardly an instant commercial success. Four years later, hand-portables only made up 6 per cent of sales.It is to countries such as Finland and Japan that we must turn to find enthusiasm for well-designed and colourful handsets. Garrard offers an explanation for the slow adoption of