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Richard Frenkiel AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill R The invention covers the "underlaid call" concept, which simplified the process of adding smaller cells to a system as more customers demand service. The pioneering work begun by Frenkiel and others at Bell Labs shaped the basic cellular system architecture and solved complex problems, such as how cellular systems locate vehicles and hand off calls from cell to cell as vehicles move. Frenkiel received the 1994 National Medal of Technology for this work. Frenkiel's inventions are directly responsible for increasing mobile communications a thousand fold and making possible today's $13 billion cellular industry. Currently, there are 19 million cellular users with 17,000 new subscribers signing up each day. During the past two decades, Frenkiel led a team of engineers at AT&T Bell Labs whose pioneering work in cellular technology increased capacity and made possible today's cellular services. He retired in 1993 and is now an industry consultant, teacher and writer. |
