Car phone

From Free net encyclopedia

A car phone is a mobile phone device specifically designed and fitted into automobiles. The car phone was once, in the late 1970s and 1980s, more popular than a regular mobile phone. However, since the mobile phone boom in the 1990s, when they became much more affordable, the car phone has suffered, as most people carry their small portable mobile phone around with them, even in the car. However, hands free kits are now installed into cars, so the driver can talk and listen to a call while driving.

Traditional car phone service might now be called a 0G (zeroth-generation) service, where 1G (first-generation) is thought of as the beginning of modern cellular telephone service. In North America, car phones typically used the MTS (Mobile Telephone Service), which was first used in St. Louis, or IMTS (Improved Mobile Telephone Service) before giving way to analog cellular service (AMPS) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In Finland, car phone service was first available in 1971 on the zero-generation ARP (Autoradiopuhelin, or Car Radiophone) service. This was succeeded in 1982 by the 1G system NMT (Nordic Mobile Telephone), used across Scandinavia and in other often remote areas.

While car phone-type services have been suspended in many areas of the world, the service persists in some remote areas. Many more modern mobile telephone systems do not have the range or transmission power that car phone systems have, nor are their telephones large enough to accommodate the higher-power transmission equipment used in car phones. Template:Com-stub ja:自動車電話 nl:Autotelefoon