A mobile or cell(ular) (tele)phone is a long-range, portable electronic device for peer-to-peer telecommunications over long distances.
Mock-up of the "portable phone of the future", from a mid-60s Bell System advertisement, shows a device not too different from today's mobile telephones.
Radio phones have a long and varied history that stretches back to the 1950s, with hand-held cellular radio devices being available since 1983. Due to their low establishment costs and rapid deployment, mobile phone networks have since spread rapidly throughout the world, outstripping the growth of fixed telephony.
World mobile phone usage
In most of Europe, wealthier parts of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Australia, Canada, and the United States, mobile phones are now widely used, with the majority of the adult, teenage, and even child population owning one [citation needed]. At present India and China have the largest growth rates of cellular subscribers in the world. The availability of Prepaid or pay as you go services, where the subscriber does not have to commit to a long term contract, has helped fuel this growth on a monumental scale.
The mobile phone has become ubiquitous because of the interoperability of mobile phones across different networks and countries. This is due to the equipment manufacturers working to meet one of a few standards, particularly the GSM standard which was designed for Europe-wide interoperability. All European nations and most Asian and African nations adopted it as their sole standard. In other countries, such as the United States, Australia, Japan, and South Korea, legislation does not require any particular standard, and GSM coexists with other standards, such as CDMA and iDEN.