Duplicate Keywords - List #6 (Proposal for Permanent Merging and Auto-Conversion)

Hey @Michelle,  I just wanted to give this thread a bump to make sure it isn't forgotten. Looks like you got through the "d.j." line on the list. 

The differences between a mobile phone and a cell phone were much discussed in the past.  All cell phones are mobile phones, but all mobile phones are not cell phones.  A walkie-talkie, for example, is a mobile phone, but it is not a cell phone.

@bradley_kent 

You are correct that the term "mobile-phone" is technically broader than "cell-phone," and I did think about this before putting it on the list.

The problem, though, is the actual use of the "mobile-phone" keyword on IMDb -- it has been used  interchangeably with "cell-phone."

Given the actual use of the "mobile-phone" keyword, I am not sure what can be done to fix the situation except for merging the keywords.

For now, I will remove this entry from my list so we can continue discussing before any action is taken.

You say this issue was "much discussed in the past" -- can you point me to any posts where this topic was discussed? I searched and was unable to find anything.

According to wikipedia, cellular technology for mobile phones has been available since about 1979-1981. There are only seven titles from before that period that include the keyword "mobile-phone."  Those might be the only titles on IMDb where "mobile-phone" is used to denote phones that are mobile phones but not cell phones. Can you cite any other titles?

A flip phone is a mobile phone, but it is not usually considered to be a cell phone.  

I don't think the bolded part is correct. Flip phones have always been referred to as cell phones in some countries, and mobile phones in other countries. There's not anything different or unique about flip phones in this respect. 

Here is proof that commercial flip phones have been referred to as cell phones from the very start. The Motorola MicroTAC 9800X, released in 1989 and considered to the first flip phone, was given the full name the "MicroTAC Pocket Cellular Telephone."   And the Motorola StarTAC, which launched the flip phone revolution, was released in 1996 and even back then was dubbed by Motorola "the smallest cellular phone." 

Here is a good article tracing the history of the "cell-phone" and "mobile-phone" technologies and terms: Why Are Mobile Phones Called Cell Phones? 

Good point about the keyword "cel-phone" [sic]. I have come across several instances of that keyword, too. They were all added by the "leggy-chick" spammer. He is also responsible for many of the "mobile-phone" keywords on IMDb. 

Bump.

@Michelle 

I am bumping this thread, since my list is only partially resolved.

Bump.

I spot-checked most of the keywords, and it looks like most of them have now been merged. Thank you, @Michelle!

@bradley_kent​ 

A walkie talkie is certainly not a mobile phone in any sense of the word. Walkie talkies are direct communication devices using short length radio waves. Mobile phones are not point to point communication devices and requires repeaters to relay the message. Mobile phones and cell phones are almost certainly the same thing in almost any vernacular.

A flip phone is almost certainly a cell phone. I had flip phones for many years. I had contracts with cell phone provides to provide access for those flip phones. They most certainly were cell phones.

Even the oldest car phones going back to the 60s or 70s were most certainly "cell phone" types. There really is no technical distinction in how they work, you in their prevalence.

@adrian​

@bradley_kent 

I have just done some "auditing" of the use of the keywords "cell-phone," "mobile-phone," and "mobile-telephone" on titles released before 1979. There were about seven or eight titles released during that time period that had any of these keywords.

For one of the titles I was able to figure out a more suitable keyword: "mobile-command-post." 

For several others, I was able to figure out that neither of these keywords applied. Take, for example, the episode of Mission: Impossible called Gitano. Somebody put the keyword "cell-phone" on there. I guess the secret phone shown at 28:00 on this video (a phone locked in a cabinet, possibly a direct line) qualifies as a cell phone in their book. It is so obviously not a cell phone, though. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6tlvcc

I did find one title that had the keyword "mobile-telephone" that shows a type of car phone all the way back in 1949: Mobile Telephones (1949).

From the YouTube video description:

[Mobile Telephone Service] MTS was a pre-cellular VHF radio system that linked to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). As such it used both radio signals and telephone lines to connect parties. MTS was the radiotelephone equivalent of land dial phone service. The Mobile Telephone Service was one of the earliest mobile telephone standards. It was operator assisted in both directions, meaning that if one were called from a land line the call would be routed to a mobile operator, who would route it to one's phone. Similarly, to make an outbound call one had to go through the mobile operator, who would ask for the mobile number and the number to be called, and would then place the call.

This service originated with the Bell System, and was first used in St. Louis on June 17, 1946. The original equipment weighed 80 pounds (36 kg), and there were initially only 3 channels for all the users in the metropolitan area, later more licenses were added bringing the total to 32 channels across 3 bands  This service was used at least into the 1980s in large portions of North America. On October 2, 1946, Motorola communications equipment carried the first calls on Illinois Bell Telephone Company's new car radiotelephone service in Chicago. Due to the small number of radio frequencies available, the service quickly reached capacity. MTS was replaced by Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS), introduced in 1964.

@keyword_expert​ 

Literally, this is what I do for a living. I write mobile/satellite communication protocols. There is nothing innately difference in any protocol using radios as phones. (This is distinctly different from point to point communications such as walkie talkie which are only good over short ranges.) So, mobile phones makes no real distinction from cell phones exception the technology used to implement the protocols. If you think this is a valid distinction, then cell phone isn't a great key word and you should have cdma cell phones and tdma cell phones which accomplish the same end results with very different technology. Of course, there is no clue to what any technology is used in any show or movie that I'm aware of. Hence, the two terms should be combined.

@keyword_expert​ 

I do agree with a separate keyword for satellite-phone though the concept is virtually the same for cell service except using satellites instead of towers. Practically, satellite phones are much more expensive and you are never without service which is why people use them in certain situations.

@adrian​

Which keyword should they be merged in favor of?

mobile-phone (1253 titles)

mobile-telephone (219 titles)

cell-phone (6185 titles)

cellular-phone (14 titles)

"Cell phone" is clearly the more prevalent term, and is the term more commonly used in the USA today (while "mobile phone" is used in many other countries).  And IMDb prefers spellings and terms used in the USA.

On the other hand, could that car phone shown in the 1949 film I linked to be accurately described as a "cell phone?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_network

@adrian​ 

I did some more research on this, and it feels pretty clear to me that a mobile telephone system is not necessarily the same thing as a cellular telephone system. Those concepts might be synonymous with today's phones, but in the 1940s through the 1970s there were several mobile phone systems that did not rely on cell towers, and hence are now referred to as "pre-cellular" or "non-cellular."

This article was the best source that helped me understand this, and I will bold the most relevant parts in the excerpt below:

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2010/04/20/introduction-why-study-mobile-phones/

A brief history of the mobile phone as a technology

The idea for cellular telephony originated in the US. The first cellular call and the first call from a hand held cellular device also were placed in the US.

The cell phone merges the landline telephony system with wireless communication. The landline telephone was first patented in 1876. Mobile radio systems have been used since the early 1900’s in the form of ship to shore radio, and were installed in some police cars in Detroit starting in 1921. The blending of landline telephone and radio communication came after the Second World War. The first commercially available “mobile radiophone service” that allowed calls from fixed to mobile telephones was offered in St. Louis in 1946. By 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the US.3 This was a non-cellular system that made relatively inefficient use of the radio bandwidth. In addition, the telephones were large, energy intensive car-mounted devices. According to communications scholar Thomas Farley, the headlights of a car would noticeably dim when the user was transmitting a call.4

In the drive to produce a more efficient mobile telephone system, researchers W. Rae Young and Douglas Ring of Bell Labs developed the idea of cellular telephony, in which geographical areas are divided into a mesh of cells, each with its own cell tower.5 This allowed a far more efficient use of the radio spectrum and the “cell” phones needed less power to send and receive a signal. The first installation was in 1969 on the Amtrak Metroliner that traveled between New York City and Washington. Four years later Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first cellular call from a prototype handheld cell phone.

These Wikipedia articles also provide more info about pre-cellular technology (now referred to as 0G technology):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_technology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_telephony

My conclusion is that all cell phones are mobile phones, but (at least prior to the 1980s), not all mobile phones were cell phones.

And to make things more complicated, today "mobile-phone" and "cell-phone" mean the same thing, just that one term is used in Europe and other places, while a different term is used in America and other places.

Normally I would say just merge everything in favor of "cell-phone." But since these keywords do apply to pre-1980s titles that include mobile phones that did not use cellular technology, I don't think that solution works. 

Sorry, but no matter what you think, they are the same thing and in any nomenclature, they are going to equate to the same thing. You are, of course, entitled to be incorrect but for keywords there is going to be absolutely no difference for anyone using them.

@adrian​ 

I meant to link again to that 1949 short film that I have mentioned a couple times now, but failed to include the link. I will include it again at the very bottom of this response. Are you saying that AT&T's 1940s-era Mobile Telephone Service (MTS) as shown in that film could legitimately be called a "cell phone?"

And I'm trying hard to understand why I am "incorrect," but you're not giving me much to go on other than just "you are entitled to be incorrect." 

What exactly did I say that was incorrect, and why is it incorrect?  Please enlighten me.

To be crystal clear on my end, my point is that according to the sources I have cited, mobile phones in use from the 1940s through the mid-1970s cannot accurately be described as "cell phones" because they did not rely on cell towers that divide up coverage into distinct geographic areas ("cells"). 

Here's another source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_radio_telephone

Mobile radio telephone systems were telephone systems of a wireless type that preceded the modern cellular mobile form of telephony technology. Since they were the predecessors of the first generation of cellular telephones, these systems are sometimes retroactively referred to as pre-cellular (or sometimes zero generation, that is, 0G) systems. Technologies used in pre-cellular systems included the Push to Talk (PTT or manual), Mobile Telephone Service (MTS), Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS), and Advanced Mobile Telephone System (AMTS) systems. These early mobile telephone systems can be distinguished from earlier closed radiotelephone systems in that they were available as a commercial service that was part of the public switched telephone network, with their own telephone numbers, rather than part of a closed network such as a police radio or taxi dispatching system.

And this source says that the first commercial cellular network (1G technology) was launched in Japan in 1979 (and it again uses the word "pre-cellular"):

The first commercial cellular network was launched in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in 1979, initially in the metropolitan area of Tokyo. The first phone that used this network was called TZ-801 built by Panasonic.[3] Within five years, the NTT network had been expanded to cover the whole population of Japan and became the first nationwide 1G/cellular network. Before the network in Japan, Bell Laboratories built the first cellular network around Chicago in 1977 and trialled it in 1978.[4]

As in the pre-cellular era, the Nordic countries were among the pioneers in wireless technologies. These countries together designed the NMT standard which first launched in Sweden in 1981.[5] NMT was the first mobile phone network to feature international roaming. In 1983, the first 1G cellular network launched in the United States, which was Chicago-based Ameritech using the Motorola DynaTAC mobile phone.

Are you saying that it would be appropriate to call pre-1980s mobile phones "cellular phones" or "cell phones?" 

You previously said "there is no clue to what any technology is used in any show or movie that I'm aware of." Well, the best example I have given you (several times now) is this title:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12048434/reference/

And we do know the technology shown in that title. It was called the "Mobile Telephone Service" (MTS) -- sometimes also called the Mobile Telephone System -- launched by AT&T in 1946 in St. Louis and later expanded to other cities. 

This source discusses MTS:

https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/cell-phones-over-time-6e50318a-1d7d-46c5-bed3-ecef15db90be

In 1949 AT&T commercialized Mobile Telephone Service. The phones they used were not cell phones but were poratble and called mobile phones. From its start in St. Louis in 1946, AT&T then introduced Mobile Telephone Service to one hundred towns and highway corridors by 1948. Mobile Telephone Service was a rarity with only 5,000 customers placing about 30 000 calls each week.

This other source also talks about MTS being in use prior to cell phone technology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Telephone_Service#Frequency_problems_and_elimination_of_the_service

These channels are prone to network congestion and interference since a radio closer to the terminal will sometimes take over the channel due to having a more powerful signal. The service uses technology that has been manufacturer discontinued for more than three decades.

The driver for replacement in most of North America, particularly large cities, was congestion, the inability of the network to carry more than two dozen channels in a geographic area. Cellular service resolved this congestion problem very effectively, especially since cellular frequencies, typically UHF, do not reach as far as VHF frequencies and can therefore be reused. The ability of a cellular system to use signal strength to choose channels and split cells into smaller units also helps expand channel capacity.

The driver for replacement in remote areas, however, is not network congestion, but obsolescence. Because the equipment is no longer manufactured, companies still using the service must struggle to keep their equipment operating, either by cannibalising from retired equipment or improvising solutions. Due to insufficient traffic, cellular is not a cost-effective replacement. Currently, the only viable solution is satellite telephony, as the small number of "base stations" which orbit the planet serve large geographic regions as they pass over. Cost, however, has been an issue, and the replacement has become acceptable to VHF mobile customers gradually, as the cost of satellite telephony has been dropping and will continue to drop.

Many MTS frequencies are now used for local paging services. They are only found in some parts of rural North America, having been replaced in most areas by cellular service in the 1980s or later.

You seem to be suggesting that it would be appropriate to use the keyword "cell-phone" for the Mobile Telephone System as shown in that 1949 title (video linked below).  Can you please explain why this 1940s mobile phone system could legitimately be called a "cell phone?"

The film does say that there are radio towers spaced around the city to connect the call, but at 6:28 on the video the narrator says "the return message -- that is the base station end of the call -- goes out over a telephone line to a transmitter which is powerful enough to cover the entire city from a single, high, centrally located antenna." That to me says that one end of the call is not relayed by a series of cell towers broken into a grid, but rather by a single tower. And that is my understanding of why this 1940s-era technology could not be called "cell phones" (not even retroactively), even if they were called "mobile telephones." What am I missing? 

@keyword_expert​ Hi!

All auto-converted :)

Thanks!

@Bethanny​ Thank you!

@Bethanny​ p.s. And now I have manually merged/edited the keywords that had been recreated. So this list should be completely finished.

@keyword_expert​ Thanks for all the efforts, we really appreciate it. :)