Richard H. Frenkiel (born March 4, 1943 [1] in Brooklyn, New York) [2] is an American engineer, known for his significant role in the early development of cellular telephone networks.
Richard H. Frenkiel (born March 4, 1943 [1] in Brooklyn, New York) [2] is an American engineer, known for his significant role in the early development of cellular telephone networks.
Frenkiel earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at Tufts University and a master's degree at Rutgers University in 1965. [2] Beginning in 1963, he worked for Bell Labs where he first designed recorded announcement machines. [3] In late 1965, he was invited to get involved in the early planning of cellular telephone systems and was paired with Philip T. Porter, a cellular pioneer. They focused on cell geometry, vehicle locating and handoff, and overall system architecture, leading to an early system proposal. [4] With Porter and Joel S. Engel, he was an author of the "High Capacity Mobile Telephone System Feasibility Studies and System Plan" which was filed with the FCC in 1971 and became an important cellular text. [5] [2]
From 1971 to 1973, Frenkiel worked at AT&T Corporate Headquarters, where he became a primary interface with the FCC on Cellular issues. In 1973, he returned to Bell Labs, where he managed a group of mobile phone system engineers. Their focus was on vehicle-locating techniques, maximizing channel efficiency, and methods of splitting cells to include additional towers for high volume areas. [6] His "underlaid cell" concept greatly reduced the cost and logistic complexity of cell splitting [2] and became AT&T's most sought-after patent in cross-licensing agreements.[ citation needed ]
For five years Frenkiel was head of the Mobile Systems Engineering Dept. at Bell Labs during the transition from experimental systems to commercial service. His department developed interface specifications for nationwide compatibility among cellular companies. He also served on the Electronic Industries Alliance Committee which proposed rules for cellular systems that were adopted by the FCC. After the FCC allocated new frequencies in 1968 for mobile phones, Frenkiel's engineering team developed specifications for cellular networks and its parametrization (1971). This was the basis for AMPS. [7]
Frenkiel transferred to the AT&T Information Systems Labs in 1983, where he became head of cordless telephone development. He led the development of the 5000 series of cordless telephones, which achieved a much higher level of quality and performance than previous cordless telephones. He was also responsible for the early manufacture of those products in Singapore, pioneering the outsourcing of manufacturing within AT&T. [5]
In 1994, Frenkiel was a co-recipient, along with Joel S. Engel, of the National Medal of Technology for their contributions to the creation of cellular systems. [2] He has also received the Alexander Graham Bell Medal (1987) [2] and the Achievement Award of the Industrial Research Institute (1992). He has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering and is a Fellow of the IEEE.
In 1994 Frenkiel returned to Rutgers University where he became a Visiting Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Director for Strategic Planning at WINLAB at Rutgers. [8] He also works as an industry consultant and writer, and was Mayor of Manalapan, New Jersey in 1999. [5] He currently teaches a course in Wireless Business Strategy at Rutgers University
Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) was an analog mobile phone system standard originally developed by Bell Labs and later modified in a cooperative effort between Bell Labs and Motorola. It was officially introduced in the Americas on October 13, 1983, and was deployed in many other countries too, including Israel in 1986, Australia in 1987, Singapore in 1988, and Pakistan in 1990. It was the primary analog mobile phone system in North America through the 1980s and into the 2000s. As of February 18, 2008, carriers in the United States were no longer required to support AMPS and companies such as AT&T and Verizon Communications have discontinued this service permanently. AMPS was discontinued in Australia in September 2000, in India by October 2004, in Israel by January 2010, and Brazil by 2010.
Ultra high frequency (UHF) is the ITU designation for radio frequencies in the range between 300 megahertz (MHz) and 3 gigahertz (GHz), also known as the decimetre band as the wavelengths range from one meter to one tenth of a meter. Radio waves with frequencies above the UHF band fall into the super-high frequency (SHF) or microwave frequency range. Lower frequency signals fall into the VHF or lower bands. UHF radio waves propagate mainly by line of sight; they are blocked by hills and large buildings although the transmission through building walls is strong enough for indoor reception. They are used for television broadcasting, cell phones, satellite communication including GPS, personal radio services including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, walkie-talkies, cordless phones, satellite phones, and numerous other applications.
Wireless communication is the transfer of information (telecommunication) between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided medium for the transfer. The most common wireless technologies use radio waves. With radio waves, intended distances can be short, such as a few meters for Bluetooth or as far as millions of kilometers for deep-space radio communications. It encompasses various types of fixed, mobile, and portable applications, including two-way radios, cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and wireless networking. Other examples of applications of radio wireless technology include GPS units, garage door openers, wireless computer mouse, keyboards and headsets, headphones, radio receivers, satellite television, broadcast television and cordless telephones. Somewhat less common methods of achieving wireless communications involve other electromagnetic phenomena, such as light and magnetic or electric fields, or the use of sound.
A cellular network or mobile network is a telecommunications network where the link to and from end nodes is wireless and the network is distributed over land areas called cells, each served by at least one fixed-location transceiver. These base stations provide the cell with the network coverage which can be used for transmission of voice, data, and other types of content. A cell typically uses a different set of frequencies from neighboring cells, to avoid interference and provide guaranteed service quality within each cell.
A cordless telephone or portable telephone has a portable telephone handset that connects by radio to a base station connected to the public telephone network. The operational range is limited, usually to the same building or within some short distance from the base station.
Mobile telephony is the provision of telephone services to mobile phones rather than fixed-location phones. Telephony is supposed to specifically point to a voice-only service or connection, though sometimes the line may blur.
A mixed-signal integrated circuit is any integrated circuit that has both analog circuits and digital circuits on a single semiconductor die. Their usage has grown dramatically with the increased use of cell phones, telecommunications, portable electronics, and automobiles with electronics and digital sensors.
The history of mobile phones covers mobile communication devices that connect wirelessly to the public switched telephone network.
The DynaTAC is a series of cellular telephones manufactured by Motorola from 1983 to 1994. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X received approval from the U.S. FCC on September 21, 1983. A full charge took roughly 10 hours, and it offered 30 minutes of talk time. It also offered an LED display for dialing or recall of one of 30 phone numbers. It was priced at $3,995 in 1984, its commercial release year, equivalent to $11,716 in 2023. DynaTAC was an abbreviation of "Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage".
A mobile phone operator, wireless provider, or carrier is a mobile telecommunications company that provides wireless Internet GSM services for mobile device users. The operator gives a SIM card to the customer who inserts it into the mobile device to gain access to the service.
Martin Cooper is an American engineer. He is a pioneer in the wireless communications industry, especially in radio spectrum management, with eleven patents in the field.
Donald C. Cox is an American electrical engineer researching wireless communication, currently a professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he heads the Wireless Communications Research Group. His work on multipath and other propagation problems has been fundamental to the development of mobile phone technology.
Amos Edward Joel Jr. was an American electrical engineer, known for several contributions and over seventy patents related to telecommunications switching systems.
William Rae Young, Jr. was one of the Bell Labs engineers that invented the cell phone.
Joel Stanley Engel is an American electrical engineer who made fundamental contributions to the development of cellular networks.
Jesse Eugene Russell is an American inventor. He was trained as an electrical engineer at Tennessee State University and Stanford University, and worked in the field of wireless communication for over 20 years. He holds patents and continues to invent and innovate in the emerging area of next generation broadband wireless networks, technologies and services, often referred to as 4G. Russell was inducted into the US National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to the field of wireless communication. He pioneered the field of digital cellular communication in the 1980s through the use of high power linear amplification and low bit rate voice encoding technologies and received a patent in 1992 for his work in the area of digital cellular base station design.
Philip Thomas Porter was an electrical engineer and one of the guiding pioneers of the invention and development of early cellular telephone networks.
Yoshihisa Okumura was a Japanese engineer, known for development of cellular telephone networks. His radio survey of signal strength as a function of distance as measured in drive tests in automobiles was critical to the system planning of mobile radio telephone systems.
Thomas Haug was a Norwegian-Swedish electrical engineer known for developing the cellular telephone networks.
RF CMOS is a metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit (IC) technology that integrates radio-frequency (RF), analog and digital electronics on a mixed-signal CMOS RF circuit chip. It is widely used in modern wireless telecommunications, such as cellular networks, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS receivers, broadcasting, vehicular communication systems, and the radio transceivers in all modern mobile phones and wireless networking devices. RF CMOS technology was pioneered by Pakistani engineer Asad Ali Abidi at UCLA during the late 1980s to early 1990s, and helped bring about the wireless revolution with the introduction of digital signal processing in wireless communications. The development and design of RF CMOS devices was enabled by van der Ziel's FET RF noise model, which was published in the early 1960s and remained largely forgotten until the 1990s.
Nevertheless, in 1987, Frenkiel and Engel were awarded the Alexander Graham Bell Medal of the IEEE 'for exceptional contributions to the advancement of telecommunications.' In 1994, the pair received National Medals of Technology from President Clinton.
His first job involved designing "recorded announcement" machines that told callers the time of day or gave them phone numbers.
Citation: Pioneering contributions to the world's first cellular telephone networks, systems, and standards.
Frenkiel invented a concept that simplified the process of adding smaller cells to a cellular network as more customers wanted service. The network tracked mobile telephones in cars and other vehicles and switched calls from cell to cell as the telephone moved through an area. In doing so, the engineers solved a number of complex problems, such as how cellular systems locate vehicles and how calls made from moving vehicles can be handed off from cell to cell.
For contributions to the theory and design of cellular mobile telecommunications. (1988)
