USA phone companies were deregulated in 1984.
That was 15 years before anyone I knew even owned a cell phone.
Cell phones caught on in other parts of the world much faster than the USA because foreign land lines were much more expensive, and much less reliable, than land lines in the USA, which had the best land line system in the world.
Actually that’s not true. I had a fiber optic phone line in the 80s in England. (passive optical network, aka TPON infrastructure.) It spanked the US system.
That was being rolled out by the nationalised BT, and Thatcher sold BT off. Surprise surprise, the privatised BT put the kybosh on TPON and we had to wait over 20 years for their Openreach division to retart rolling out fibre.
Us Brits had maglev decades ago, and tilting trains in the 70s. Bloody statism, eh?!
Privatisation killed them both off. If we want tilting high speed trains now, we have to pay another country.
All the key inventions for cellular radio networks were made before the breakup of the Bell System. The first demonstration of the Motorola hand held was in 1973.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones
In December 1947, Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones in vehicles.[17] At this stage, the technology to implement these ideas did not exist, nor had the frequencies been allocated. Two decades would pass before Richard H. Frenkiel, Joel S. Engel and Philip T. Porter of Bell Labs expanded the early proposals into a much more detailed system plan. It was Porter who first proposed that the cell towers use the now-familiar directional antennas to reduce interference and increase channel reuse (see picture at right)[18] Porter also invented the dial-then-send method used by all cell phones to reduce wasted channel time.
In all these early examples, a mobile phone had to stay within the coverage area serviced by one base station throughout the phone call, i.e. there was no continuity of service as the phones moved through several cell areas. The concepts of frequency reuse and handoff, as well as a number of other concepts that formed the basis of modern cell phone technology, were described in the late 1960s, in papers by Frenkiel and Porter. In 1970 Amos E. Joel, Jr., a Bell Labs engineer,[19] invented a “three-sided trunk circuit” to aid in the “call handoff” process from one cell to another. His patent contained an early description of the Bell Labs cellular concept, but as switching systems became faster, such a circuit became unnecessary and was never implemented in a system.
A cellular telephone switching plan was described by Fluhr and Nussbaum in 1973,[20] and a cellular telephone data signaling system was described in 1977 by Hachenburg et al.[21]
You didn’t know anyone whom had a cell phone prior to 1999?
that is almost impossible to believe. Plenty of people paid $1000/mo for suitcase phones that cut out every other minute in the 80’s.
and you would’ve known someone earlier had the monopoly been broken up earlier-at which point what you posted is relevant