Editor’s Note: Welcome to our coverage of 25 years in wireless. RCR Wireless News is celebrating with a package of stories detailing the advances of the past three decades. For full coverage please visit RCRWireless.com/25years.

A quote, “Under the tree in ‘83,” that I wrote in 1993 as RCR Wireless News celebrated the first decade of the cellular industry triggered a flood of memories as we put together stories for the 25th anniversary.

--The day Ameritech decided to rip out its TDMA network and start from scratch with a CDMA network was earth-shattering news. As a reporter hearing so much propaganda from both sides of the TDMA vs. CDMA debate, having an established operator switch technology gave CDMA technology a lot of credibility in my book.

--The day Ericsson and Qualcomm cross-licensed each others’ patents and Qualcomm sold its infrastructure business to Ericsson was an especially crazy day for the edit staff. I must have been naïve, but I never thought those two would reach a deal. How would employees at Qualcomm’s network unit handle the change? They hated Ericsson. Now they were Ericsson employees.

--The industry spent a lot of energy debating whether PCS was just cellular at another frequency, or a completely new value proposition. (The answer: both.) Here’s a fun sentence from a 1993 story on that very debate: A researcher “pointed out that people are not going to run to advanced technologies just because they’re available. Only 66% of people have touch-tone phones, he noted. The rest of the population apparently is satisfied with rotary-dial phones.”

But the thing that strikes me most from the early days of cellular is how often those early visions of the promise of wireless were on target. I remember attending a conference in Texas that aimed to combine the computing and wireless worlds. My task was to see if the newspaper needed to launch a separate publication that would cover wireless data. Each time a paging or cellular executive spoke, I understood the conversation. Each time the speaker was from the computing side of the industry, I was lost. Nevertheless, these executives convinced me the industries would converge; that data would be part of wireless and that computers would incorporate wireless technology.

And a professor I interviewed in the early 1990s predicted both the upside and downside of mobile social networking before mobile social networking was a phrase.

So as we stand at the dawn of a new era of wireless broadband, let’s raise a glass to the past 25 years and cheer on the next 25.

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