Cellular pioneer still causing stir

Even in 1973, New Yorkers had a reputation for taking things in stride. But when Martin Cooper emerged from a Hilton Hotel 30 years ago Thursday to make the first calls with a portable cellular phone, he drew a crowd of gawkers.

By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist

Today, the only gawking would be directed at the Motorola prototype he used, a brick-sized device that weighed 30 ounces. Today, we do more than talk with our phones; we keep track of people and appointments, take photos and browse the Web. Today, Cooper heads a Silicon Valley company that sells technology for high-speed wireless data connections.

The first commercial cellular service didn’t start for another decade after Cooper’s pathbreaking calls that April 3. But there’s no doubt that Cooper, then a Motorola vice president and now widely acknowledged as the father of the modern cell phone, launched a revolution that keeps accelerating. And he’s still challenging the established wisdom.

The challenge in 1973 was to the telecommunications monopoly. AT&T was selling car phones, Cooper recalls, but wasn’t planning to introduce true portables for years to come. Motorola had developed technology to shrink the heavy car-phone gear down to a hand-held size, and the company needed to show that it worked.

The demonstration, he says, was largely for the Federal Communications Commission, which then (as now) allocated pieces of the airwaves for various uses. New York was chosen for the demo because it was “the center of public relations,” and the stunt generated coverage all over the world.

I caught up with Cooper at the recent Cellular Telecommunications Internet Association trade show in New Orleans, where the descendants of his portable phone were dazzling passersby. Cooper contained his enthusiasm, saying the industry is “focused on gimmicks and gadgets and has forgotten the customer.”

Service innovations aren’t entirely a wasteland, of course. Younger users have tended to show the phone companies the most interesting new ways to use the services, including the youth-led rise of text messaging in places like Finland and Japan. In the United States, experiments combining handheld organizers with phones have produced some products with great potential.

Many carriers still exhibit the monopolistic attitudes of legacy telecom companies. They control the networks and the service, a combination that holds back the kind of furious innovation we need, Cooper says, not to mention the essential basics.

“I thought people wanted, first of all, a reliable call,” he says.

Fat chance. U.S. mobile carriers insist that the locations of their innumerable dead spots — the places where they’ll drop your call off the network because there’s no base station nearby — are trade secrets. (I’ve had service from three major carriers in the last five years, and reliability is more spotty than ever.)

What about serving customers other than the business people who buy expensive monthly service contracts? What about services aimed at seniors, for instance? Separate the people who deal in transporting voice and data from the people who deal with customers, Cooper says, and you’ll see an array of services to meet many needs.

The needs he’s trying to meet these days are for faster mobile data access. ArrayComm, the San Jose company where he’s chairman and chief executive, has developed “smart radio” base stations that constantly calculate the location of mobile devices. The antennas then focus signals directly on the correct devices, and the results include better connections and higher capacity in the system.

ArrayComm’s early focus on voice has evolved to what Cooper hopes will be the best answer yet to the “last-mile problem” in broadband data access. With a technology called i-Burst, he says, mobile carriers could provide high-speed data connections comparable to cable and digital subscriber line competitors at a much lower price — and add mobile capabilities to boot.

Earlier ArrayComm technology is already in commercial use in Japan. Trials of the i-Burst system are beginning in Australia soon, with carriers in place to offer data service to end users later this year. A Korean launch is also in the works, the company says, and major Asian equipment makers have licensed it. The Australian system will have the kind of corporate architecture Cooper advocates — a company providing the transport of data and other companies building services on top.

Whether ArrayComm will emerge as a big winner or be remembered as an innovator that couldn’t find a niche, Cooper’s place in telecom history is assured. He’s a legend, deservedly.

Now, if he could only do something about rude people who leave their phones on at the movies. . . .

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/5517519.htm