The invention of these portable and now so popular communication devices dates back to just over half a century. The first publicly available cell phones sold in the US in 1983 cost nearly $ 4,000 and were analog. With the development of technology, digital 2G soon arrived, dividing the international market between two standards, US GSM and CDMA, European. In addition to transmitting and receiving the speech of its users, mobile phones have become multimedia devices, beginning by sending texts, including calendar, address book, clock, calculator, and then email and a touch screen. It was the beginning of the era of so-called smartphones.
Mobile phones are of major importance in today's spectrum management, as they respond to a growing demand for data transmission space: an estimated half a billion mobile devices (497 million) were added in 2014, and smartphones with called a 4G connection, generated a traffic rate ten times higher than devices without this connection. Although 4Gs represent only 6% of today's mobile connections, they already account for 40% of total mobile data traffic.
The need for more spectrum available for the growth of mobile services has been pushing the acceleration of migration from analogue to digital television in Brazil. All over the world, this pressure has been facing, and in the national case, the current band of television has been allocated to serve the 4G, causing the government to subsidize the migration of television, giving to the population that would hardly buy the digital receivers an equipment that is a true multimedia platform of communication.
The presence of smartphones in people's lives has brought concerns to security experts. It is argued that they are not safe, and that they work in a way to save information of the users to generate the calls Big Data, great databases that allow the analysis of the behavior of the people. This makes cell phones more modern in permanent surveillance tools, because they have cameras, audio recorders, and, connected to the internet, permanently locate the movement of people. A great security executive would have even said: if you want privacy, throw away your smartphones!
In addition to the large service providers, some local cellular communication initiatives have been thriving, such as the pioneering case in Oaxaca maintained by the Rhizomatica organization, and the experiments in Pará started under the coordination of prof. Aldebaro Klautau. Both start from the consideration that companies have not fully served the territories where they have allocated spectrum to provide services, leaving the population without connection. As an alternative to this demand, communities have been organizing and seeking to install and manage their own communication services, with enormous advantages in terms of connection costs and technological autonomy. But, for now, local services still do not transmit data, and are focused on allowing the exchange of messages and messages from their users, something that should evolve in the near future.