Council Report) As we can see form the statistics in Figures 2-3 and 2-4, wireline is definitely in the decline in the large industrialized nations. Wireless Technology Lifecycle Looking at the lifecycle of the wireline industry provides us with several valuable insights. First, it confirms that the new technology assimilation lifecycle analysis is a valid one. Second, it provides us with a model for understanding how the wireless industry is behaving and is most likely to perform in the future. Third, we see the incredibly long time it takes for the lifecycle to play itself out. The wireline industry has lasted for over 100 years and will continue for some time into the future. As we shall see, this issue of the duration of the new technology lifecycle is an important component of any analysis. eXcellence in Telecommunications The Telco Churn Handbook The AMPS Lifecycle To understand more clearly how this relates to the wireless industry, we need to apply the same analysis to the first generation of "real" wireless technology, the advanced mobile phone service (AMPS) wireless product. AMPS was the first truly viable and extremely successful implementation of wireless telephony in the US. The technology was invented and first deployed by AT&T in 1983 in Chicago. AMPS was the hot new wireless technology for many years and it experienced extremely high rates of growth. In fact, it was the technology, not the market place that limited the expansion of AMPS. AMPS technology was only able to support a limited number of subscribers per cell. It requires that one analog channel support one user at a time. Therefore, a typical channel will support anywhere from 20-32 users per day. A network with 50 channels, therefore, can support a maximum of 1000-1600 subscribers. The result was that the AMPS networks were utilized to capacity in a very short amount of time. 10 years Figure 2-5: The AMPS Lifecycle Restricted by technological limitations, bandwidth availability, and economic factors, AMPS technology both established th