A mobile phone is a moveable cellular phone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while the user is moving within a telephone service area. The radio frequency link establishes a link to the switching systems of a mobile phone operator, which provides access to the public switch telephone network. Most modern mobile telephone services use cellular network architecture, and therefore mobile phones are often also called cellular telephones or cell phones. In addition to telephony, 2000s era mobile phone support a variety of other services, such as text messaging, MMS, email, Internet access, wifi communications, business applications, gaming, and digital photography. Mobile phones which offer these and more general computing capabilities are referred to as smartphones.

A handheld mobile radio telephone service was envisioned in the early stages of radio engineering. In 1917, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt filed a copyright for a pocket size folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone. Early predecessors of cellular phones included analogue radio communications from ships and trains. The race to create truly portable telephone devices began after World War II, with development taking place in many countries. The advances in mobile telephony have been traced in successive generations starting with the early “0G” services. Such as Bell System’s Mobile phone Service and its successor, the Improved Mobile phone Service. These “0G” systems were not cellular just supported few simultaneous calls and were very expensive.

The first handheld mobile phone was established by Motorola in 1973. The first mobile phone commercial automated cellular network was launched in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in 1979. This was followed in 1981 by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile phone system in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Several other countries then follow in the early to mid-1980. These 1G systems could support far more simultaneous calls but still used analogue technology.

In 1991, 2G digital cellular technology was launched in Finland by Radiolinja on the GSM standard. This spark competition in the sector as the new operators challenges the incumbent 1G network operators.

After Ten years, in 2001 the 3G was launched in Japan. This was followed by 3.5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G enhancement based on the high-speed packet access (HSPA) family, allowing UMTS networks to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity.

Then 2009, it had become clear that some point, 3G networks would be overwhelmed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive application, such as stream media. As a result, the industry began looking to data optimised 4G technologies, with the promise of speed improvement up to ten-fold over existing 3G technologies. The first two commercially available technologies billed as 4G were the wi-max standard, offered in North America by Sprint, and the LTE standard first offered in Scandinavia by Telia Sonera.