What is 0.5G?

By | July 27, 2011

0.5G was the advance version of 0G (Zero Generation or Mobile Radio Telephone system). This 0.5G technology had introduced ARP (Autoradiopuhelin) as the first commercial public mobile phone network. This ARP network was launched in 1971 at Finland.  ARP was operated on 8 Channels with a frequency of 150 MHz (147.9 – 154.875 MHz band) and its transmission power was in a range of 1 to 5 watts.  ARP used half duplex system for transmission (voice signals can either be transmitted or received at a time) with manual switched system. This Network contains cells (Land area was divided into small sectors, each sector is known as cell, a cell is covered by a radio network with one transceiver) with the cell size of 30 km.  As ARP did not support the handover, calls would get disconnected while moving from one cell to another. ARP provided 100% coverage which attracted many users towards it. ARP was successful and became very popular until the network became congested. The ARP mobile terminals were too large to be fixed in cars and were expensive too. These limitations led to invent of Autotel. Autotel are also known as PALM (Public Automated Land Mobile). Autotel is a radio telephone service which in terms of technology lies between MTS and IMTS. It used digital signals for messages like call stepup, channel assignment, ringing, etc only voice channel was analog. This system used existent high-power VHF channels instead of cellular system. It was developed in Canada and Columbia.