Cellular

What Does Cellular Mean?

Cellular refers to a network technology that facilitates mobile device communication over areas comprised of cells and transceivers, which are also known as base stations or cell sites. In a cellular network, the most widely used mobile transceivers are mobile phones, or cell phones.

Techopedia Explains Cellular

Cellular technology allows mobile device users to perform a variety of tasks, including:

Placing calls
Message transmission via short message service (SMS) and multimedia message service (MMS)
Web browsing
Facebook updates

Cellular technology is used in most mobile devices, with few exceptions (such as satellite phones) and operates through Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) through Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and other encoding techniques.

A key cellular network feature is handoff (or handover), where uninterrupted communications services are provided to a cell phone user that moves between cell locations.

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Margaret Rouse

Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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