After 40 years of cellphones, what's next?

There's a scene in the 1985 British TV mini series 'Edge of Darkness' - rated as one of the best and most influential pieces of British television drama ever made (and streets ahead of the 2010 Hollywood remake starring Mel Gibson) - that really dates it.

The central character, Yorkshire policeman Roland Craven played by Bob Peck, is trying to find why his teenage daughter has been murdered and why she was suffering from radiation poisoning. He breaks in to a supposedly long-mothballed military facility and in desperation to contact the outside world finds a working telephone: a direct line to a UK government office where a surprised worker hears a ringing phone, long-forgotten and buried behind a pile of papers, and picks it up.

Today, of course Craven wouldn't go anywhere without his cellphone. And while this month marks the 40^th anniversary of the first cellular phone call, cellular services started in the UK in the same year that Edge of Darkness was first broadcast. Australia got its first cellular telephone service in 1987. I remember the occasion very well!

I'm sure in the coming days you'll find many reports celebrating cellular's 40th anniversary (The Sydney Morning Herald on 5 April devoted half of pages two and three to the anniversary). One of my strongest memories of the earliest years of mobile telephony in Australia is how Telstra, or Telecom as it then was, and most of the pundits got their forecasts for uptake so far out, consistently underestimating uptake rates over several of those early years.

At launch of service Telecom was forecasting that it would have 200,000 users within a decade. It reached the 250,000 mark in 1991, less than three years after the launch. (That event came as a very pleasant surprise to Sydney builder Ron McAuley. As the 250,000th subscriber he was rewarded with a diamond-studded, gold-plated mobile phone valued at $20,000 - just what every builder needs! - and a week's holiday in Boston Massachusetts, where the Alexander Graham Bell Museum of Telephony was celebrating the 115th anniversary of Bell's invention).

It's easy to have 20-20 hindsight but looking back it seems hard to believe that demand for the core functionality of the mobile phone - being able to contact someone anywhere at any time - could have been so greatly underestimated. Few of us today could contemplate, for example, having to organise our social lives without the ability to contact 'on the fly' friends and family we plan to meet, relying instead solely on arrangements made in advance.

In defence of the forecasters of that era, it could be argued that costs were so high as to preclude any possibility of such a mass market, but by 1990 the effects of Moore's Law on the PC and wider IT markets were all to evident. Intel had released its first microprocessor, the 4004, with 2,300 transistors, in 1971, two years before Martin Cooper of Motorola made the world's first cellphone call. In 1989 Intel released the 80486 with almost 1.2 million transistors.

But logical extrapolations don't seem to fare very well in forecasting. Visionaries do a far better job. Remember the recent gambit employed by Samsung in its patent battle with Apple? It cited (unsuccessfully) the appearance of tablet-like devices in the 1965 movie '2001: A Space Odyssey' as evidence of 'prior art' to the invention of the iPad.

The screenplay was co-written by director Stanley Kubrick and renowned visionary and science fiction author Arthur C Clarke. He can be seen and heard in ABC TV footage in 1974 making uncannily accurate predictions of what the Internet of 2001 would offer. (and see this one of Clarke on a 1964 BBC Horizon programme.)

But for predicting the future of mobile communications this one beats the lot. The year was 1897, two years before Marconi astounded the world by transmitting Morse code wirelessly across the English Channel. The thermionic valve (able to detect and amplify weak radio signals) had yet to be invented, let alone the transistor or the integrated circuit.

Yet William Ayrton, a professor of electrical engineering at the Central Technical College, South Kensington, made a remarkably accurate if melodramatic prediction of mobile telephony. He told the audience to a lecture at the Imperial Institute in London:

"There is no doubt that the day will come…when copper wires and gutta percha coverings and iron sheathings [insulation and cladding for the first submarine cables] will be relegated to the Museum of Antiquities. Then, when a person wants to telegraph to a friend, he knows not where, he will call in an electromagnetic voice, which will be heard loud by him who has the electromagnetic ear, but will be silent to everyone else. He will call 'Where are you?' and the reply will come 'I am at the bottom of a coal mine' or 'Crossing the Andes' or 'In the middle of the Pacific'; or perhaps no reply will come at all, and he may then conclude that his friend is dead."

If you listen to Clarke's 1964 BBC Horizon talk then rather than us all having an 'electronic ear', ie a cellphone, we will have a direct electronic link to the brain. "We may develop a machine to record information directly on the brain as today we record a symphony onto tape." If that's the future, I'll stay with the past.

This article first appeared on iTWire, Australia's leading independent IT&T news and information source.