Advanced Mobile Phone Service

~ the last words ~

There were two things called AMPS and only one of them is dead. The Advanced Mobile Phone System is the analog radio standard that Bell Labs developed and then revised with Motorola, and it stayed on the air in the Americas until 2008. Advanced Mobile Phone Service, Inc. is the company AT&T created in 1978 to build and operate it, and that company lasted six years.

Louis M. Weinberg, a marketing director at AT&T, was named its first president. The work was to take a Bell Labs system that had been tested in Chicago in 1978 with roughly a hundred units and turn it into a business with paying subscribers in American cities. Service started in Chicago on 13 October 1983 and in the Washington, D.C. area that December.

Under three months after the launch it was gone. The company does not appear to have failed at anything: it built the network and switched it on, and then the antitrust settlement that broke up the Bell System reached its scheduled effective date and the subsidiary was divided among the regional holding companies that the settlement created.

~ the record ~

~ the chicago switch-on ~

The FCC's licensing design is the part that shaped everything afterwards. For each market area the commission allowed two licensees, known as the A and B carriers. The B side, the wireline license, usually went to the local phone company, and the A side went to a wireless provider from outside the telephone business. Every American city got a duopoly by construction, and that pairing shaped the US carrier market for the next twenty years.

This is also the point where my distance from the story is not about era but about radio. AMPS was an Americas and Pacific standard. Turkey's first mobile network was analog Nordic Mobile Telephone on 450 MHz, launched in 1986, and what actually reached ordinary people here was GSM from 1994, when Turkcell started. The American analog system never ran in this country at all, so an AMPS handset was never something you could put on a Turkish network.

~ cut into seven pieces ~

After divestiture the company's cellular business was divided among the seven Regional Holding Companies, later known as the RBOCs: NYNEX Mobile Communications, Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems, Ameritech Mobile Communications, BellSouth Mobility, PacTel Mobile Access, Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems and U S West NewVector.

Most of those seven were merged back together over the following thirty years, which is the long joke of the divestiture. BellSouth Mobility is a fair example of how fast the seams healed over: its own article says it was founded in 1984 during the breakup, while its infobox says 1983, and nobody has bothered to reconcile the two.

~ the analog tail ~

The standard outlasted its builder by a very wide margin. As of 18 February 2008, carriers in the United States were no longer required to support AMPS, and that requirement ending is what finally took the analog network off the air after twenty five years.

The company that carried the name had a six-year life. The radio system it built stayed in service four times as long, billed by other firms under other brands. Wikipedia's infobox gives the company a founding year and a defunct year and nothing at all in between, which is roughly the right amount of attention for an entity whose whole job was to exist until the lawyers finished.

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