Universal portable radio communications

In our highly mobile society, the provision of voice and data communications to people away from their wireline telephones has become a major communications frontier. Some emerging radio systems, e.g., cellular mobile radio, cordless telephone, and radio paging, have begun to penetrate this frontier. However, each of these approaches only partially satisfies portable communication needs. That is, the approaches do not provide overall portable communication service. Some of the problems involved and the technologies and system configurations needed for an advanced radio communications system are discussed. The goal for the system is to provide high quality ubiquitous service to low power portable radiotelephones and data terminals. Frequency reuse radio system configurations applicable to residential and large building environments will be described along with multipath and other 800 MHz radio propagation limitations. The system would use fixed radio ports attached to the telephone network and spaced about 2000 ft in residential areas. The residential ports would have antenna heights of less than 30 ft. The horizontal spacing of ports within large buildings would be 200 ft or more. In service areas, more than 99 percent radio link availability would be provided for 5 mW portable transmitters.