<P> In 1966 Norway had a system called OLT which was manually controlled . Finland's ARP, launched in 1971, was also manual as was the Swedish MTD . All were replaced by the automatic NMT, (Nordic Mobile Telephone) system in the early 1980s . </P> <P> In July 1971 Readycall was introduced in London by Burndept after obtaining a special concession to break the Post Office monopoly to allow selective calling to mobiles of calls from the public telephone system . This system was available to the public for a subscription of £ 16 month . A year later the service was extended to two other UK towns . </P> <P> West Germany had a network called A-Netz launched in 1952 as the country's first public commercial mobile phone network . In 1972 this was displaced by B - Netz which connected calls automatically . </P> <P> In December 1947, Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones in vehicles . At this stage, the technology to implement these ideas did not exist, nor had the frequencies been allocated . Two decades would pass before Richard H. Frenkiel, Joel S. Engel and Philip T. Porter of Bell Labs expanded the early proposals into a much more detailed system plan . It was Porter who first proposed that the cell towers use the now - familiar directional antennas to reduce interference and increase channel reuse (see picture at right) Porter also invented the dial - then - send method used by all cell phones to reduce wasted channel time . </P>

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