The Cable and Telecommunications Professionals' Reference, 3rd Edition

Part Four

Cellular Telephone Networks

As digital circuit-switched networks were developed during the 1970s, mobile networks soon followed to meet a variety of purposes, delivering both public and private services. The public land mobile networks (PLMN), which now reach up to 99 percent of the population in some countries, use a landline component that employs many of the basic principles of landline telephony, either based on circuit or packet techniques. However, they require additional functionality to enable radio connections to be made to mobile phones and to keep track of where the network users are located. The chapters in Part 4 that cover cellular telephone networks concentrate on the methods that have been developed to achieve this additional ...