Cellular: An economic and business history of the international mobile‐phone industry.Daniel D.Garcia‐Swartz and MartinCampbell‐Kelly, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022. pp. 400. 75 figs. ISBN 9780262543927, Pbk $45)
本书全面梳理了国际移动电话产业从起源到5G时代的长期发展，涵盖技术、市场、政策与关键企业，适合对通信产业经济史感兴趣的读者。
This book is part of several collaborations between Martin Campbell-Kelly and Daniel Garcia-Swartz on the history of computing, including notable contributions to two-sided markets. In Cellular, the authors offer a comprehensive, long-term, and detailed development of the mobile-phone telephone industry, combining relevant aspects in North America, Asia, and selected emerging markets. As a result, this book delves into the evolution of cellular technology, the emergence of key players, and the intricate interplay of market forces, policy decisions, and technological advancements that have driven its growth. Cellular offers insights into the industry's development, its impact on society, and the challenges and opportunities it faces in the digital age. Given that all these deep insights are covered in less than 400 pages, the book offers a fantastic feat of synthesis. Throughout the book, the authors aim to keep a balance between technical details to properly inform the study and avoid confusing readers who are not engineers. Data are drawn from prior scholarship, government documents, and industry reports. The book has an introduction, 12 chapters, and a conclusion, and structures its chronology around four parts, each divided into three chapters, namely, origins, standards, competition, and growth. Each part roughly maps to a decade of cellular phone generation. Although many of us loosely speak of the impact of information and telecommunication technology, the historiography easily finds they have been kept apart, particularly in the contributions around computers and computing. Communications were not really integrated into computer devices before the 1980s. This is mirrored in the stories about mechanical and electromechanical devices of the interwar period up to the 1950s, mainframes and mini computers in the 1960s and 1970s, and gaming consoles and personal computers of the 1980s. Indeed, there are but a handful of contributions to the economic history of information technology whilst many of these focus on a single country or a limited time period. Garcia-Swartz and Campbell-Kelly argue that mobile wireless communication is a distinctive computer, information, and communication platform that deserves a story of its own from an international perspective, considering its origins until contemporary developments. The introduction summarizes key themes and presents the rationale for the four parts to explain, with a general audience in mind, how the book bridges the gap between the story of communication with the broader history of computer technology. Chapter 1 marks the emergence of wireless electronic communication with the advent of the telegraph. This is followed by its evolution until the first generation of mobile phone systems before they were called cellular, whilst detailing the technological challenges to make these systems commercially viable. Chapters 2 and 3 mainly focus on developments in the 1980s. Also known as the 1G or analogue era, these chapters tell of competition dynamics and early industrial organization. One major theme of the book is technological progress. The impact of semiconductors is evident on the size, weight, and functionality of mobile devices. The second part of the book roughly covers the 1990s, starting with standards and the advent of 2G in chapter 4. Although an analysis of every market is clearly impossible, starting in chapter 5 the book focuses on exemplary developments outside Europe and North America, with the continent of Africa (chapter 11) warranting its own chapter in the 4G section. Chapter 6 re-evaluates competition in this market to document how developers and sponsors started to play an important role in the cellular industry. A third theme of the book that permeates chapters 7–10 deals with the interaction between base station and devices. This involved looking at how organizations, state agents, and other actors, established forums and set rules and standards to fine tune interactions and technical details dictating how components and parts of the system interact and interconnect with other systems (such as the fixed line telephone). Some of these standards were opened and others closed, but without them the cellular industry would have been infeasible. Open standards were often adopted outside the country where they were developed. Close standards were initially associated with single companies and were almost never adopted outside the country where they were created. The story takes us to explore developments in Asia, Oceania, Latin America, and Israel as a way to identify common challenges and growth factors. In the final chapter, the authors bring together several themes that emerge throughout the book. They present a detailed and rich story that makes crucial contributions to understanding the evolution of this industry, from Marconi to the challenges of 5G networks. Whilst comparing and contrasting developments in places as diverse as Europe, North America, China, Japan, and New Zealand, they offer a number of potentially interesting avenues that seem to explain growth and technical change that have yet to be fully explored.