3 ms·

Sounds like it was ultimately deployed in 30 Russian cities in the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altai_(mobile_telephone_system) https://en.wikipedia.or

• orbital-decay 4y ago
  Russian-language version of that article has more details. It's been widely used until early 90s by taxists, bus drivers, firefighters, emergency services, etc, but was unencrypted and had too little capacity for individual use, and also no possibility for billing. It wasn't a handheld device either. The replacement was in the plans, but the Soviet Union crashed and there was no money to develop the new system, so everyone just switched to GSM.
• prennert 4y ago
  Wild guess and it's too late to find sources, but phones in the Eastern block were a highly political thing and access to landlines was strictly controlled. So maybe there was no incentive to scale a mobile solution that worked for the elite and basic services.