AMPS, short for Advanced Mobile Phone System, refers to the first commercially available analog cellular mobile phone system. Developed and deployed in the 1980s by Bell Labs, AMPS revolutionized the way users communicated wirelessly. Primarily found in North America, this system quickly gained popularity due to its widespread coverage and easy availability.
AMPS operated on a frequency band of 800 MHz and utilized analog signaling to transmit voice calls. It employed frequency division multiple access (FDMA) as its multiple access scheme, allowing multiple users to share the available bandwidth simultaneously. This architecture assigned each call a unique frequency slot for the duration of the conversation.
With AMPS, mobile phones could connect to a nearby base station, which linked the call to the landline network. These base stations were spread across the service area, ensuring uninterrupted coverage. Users could make and receive calls while moving across different cells without experiencing disconnections.
Despite the advent of digital mobile systems like GSM and CDMA, AMPS remained in use until its discontinuation in 2008. While it offered limited capacity and lacked advanced features such as text messaging and data services, it laid the groundwork for subsequent cellular technologies and played a crucial role in the mobile phone industry's evolution, eventually paving the way for more sophisticated systems like 3G and 4G.
