Advanced Mobile Phone System

Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) is an analog mobile cell phone system standard developed by Bell Labs, and officially introduced in the Americas on October 13, 1983,Israel in 1986, Australia in 1987, and Pakistan in 1990. It was the primary analog mobile phone system in North America (and other locales) through the 1980s and into the 2000s. As of February 18, 2008, carriers in the United States were no longer required to support AMPS and companies such as AT&T and Verizon have discontinued this service permanently. AMPS was discontinued in Australia in September 2000 and in Pakistan by October 2004.

History

The first cellular network efforts began at Bell Labs (which first proposed the idea of a cellular system in 1947 and continued to petition the FCC for channels through the 1950s and 1960s) and with research conducted at Motorola. In 1960, John F. Mitchell, an electrical engineer who had graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology, became Motorola's chief engineer for its mobile-communication products. Mitchell oversaw the development and marketing of the first pager to use transistors.