Language
Country/Area
No result found
The origins of iDEN technology: How Motorola created the first mobile social network?
In an era of rapid technological development, the iDEN (Integrated Digital Enhanced Network) technology launched by Motorola in 1993 can be said to be one of the trend-setting products. The technology combines the advantages of traditional shortwave radio and mobile phones, allowing users to communicate instantly in a convenient way and is called the first mobile social network by many analysts.
The innovation of iDEN technology is that it enables users to communicate in the same spectrum space. Compared to analog cell phones or two-way radio systems, iDEN can accommodate more users and provide stable communication quality through speech compression and time division multiple access technology.
“iDEN is not only a communication tool, it is also a social platform.”
The technology was originally a project called MIRS (Motorola Integrated Wireless Systems) and dates back to 1991. The goal at the time was to improve wireless communications by utilizing discontinuous spectrum. Motorola technicians developed a software experiment to dynamically select decentralized wireless channels, allowing a GSM telecommunications switch to start a call as if it were on a continuous channel. Within just a few years, iDEN entered the market and was commercially launched by Nextel in 1996.
How iDEN works
iDEN is designed and authorized to operate on frequencies that may not be contiguous. It operates on a 25 kHz channel but occupies only 20 kHz, thus ensuring interference protection. The patent of this technology lies in its time allocation technology, which makes the transmission and reception time of each user deliberately separated, thus eliminating the need for complex duplexers on the mobile side.
"This time allocation method makes iDEN more efficient in resource use."
At the same time, the intercommunication end of the iDEN network uses GSM signals for call setup and mobility management. This architecture ensures the reliability and flexibility of the system. In order to maintain precise synchronization of data in the network, each base station used GPS satellites to obtain time reference information, which was an advanced technology at the time.
The rise of WiDENAs demand grew, Motorola introduced WiDEN (Wideband Integrated Digital Enhanced Network) in 2005, which enabled compatible devices to communicate over four 25 kHz channels, providing a bandwidth of up to 100 kbit/s. WiDEN is a 2.5G wireless cellular technology that is believed to have greatly promoted the advancement of mobile social platforms.
"The launch of WiDEN marks a further upgrade of the iDEN network, although its life span is short."
However, with the merger of Sprint and Nextel, the iDEN network was officially retired in 2013 and switched to CDMA technology. For many users, this is an inevitable technological shift as new technologies provide more advanced communication capabilities. This also makes us reflect on whether many of the innovations and technologies of the past can still take root in today's social media era?
Subsequent impact and internationalization
Although iDEN and its successor technology WiDEN gradually disappeared from the market, their influence still exists. iDEN networks have been operated in many countries such as the United States, Canada and Brazil, and users in these regions have once enjoyed the convenient services it brought. The dismantling of iDEN is undoubtedly an important turning point in the history of mobile telecommunications, but with the advent of new technologies, the old generation of technology will eventually be replaced by the new generation of communication technology.
Today, we can still see many iDEN phones from those days being hot sellers in the second-hand market. These phones are not only tools for communication, but also carry the youthful memories of a generation, making people nostalgic. But the question is, as technology changes, can we really carry over these memories and emotions into future communication technologies?
