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In
the early 1980's, the UK government wanted to introduce competition
in the Telecomms industry. They decided to award two licences
to operate cellular networks in 1982. One of the licences
was awarded to BT, which formed a company with Securicor.
Telecom Securicor Cellular Radio Ltd was born, which traded
under the name Cellnet. The other licence was offered by holding
a competition from which Racal-Millicom was selected out of
the five applicants. This company was a member of the Racal
Telecom group and is now known as Vodafone. The two companies
along with the government jointly decided the standard for
the UK networks. They agreed to base the network standard
on the north American standard Advanced Mobile Phone System
(AMPS) and this lead to the UK standard Total Access Communications
System (TACS). Cellnet and Vodafone launched their networks
in January 1985 and this was three months ahead of their licence
requirement. They both expanded their coverage to 90% population
requirement in 1987, two years ahead of the licence requirement.
This was mainly due to strong competition between the companies.
In just over two years from launch each network was supporting
400,000 customers, and continued to grow at such a pace that
each company nearly doubled in size each year.
When
Cellnet and Vodafone were initially licensed by the DTI, they
imposed a condition, which meant neither company was allowed
to sell directly to the customer. All products and services
were offered via Service Providers who became responsible
for setting customer contracts, billing, tariffs etc. This
was done either directly by the Service Provider or via Dealers.
The
basic concept behind cellular radio are not complex, the area
to be covered by the system is divided into a number of regular
cells, and each cell has a radio base station positioned to
give coverage to that cell. The mobile connects to the nearest
cell with the strongest signal and is then passed to a neighbouring
cell with a stronger signal when the original signal becomes
weak. This allows freedom for the mobile to move from cell
to cell provided there is coverage in between
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