The first cellular network efforts began at Bell Labs (which first proposed the idea of a cellular system in 1947 and continued to petition the FCC for channels through the 1950s and 1960s) and with research conducted at Motorola.
While Motorola was developing a cellular phone, from 1968-1983 Bell Labs worked out a system called Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS), which became the first cellular network standard in the United States.