Jesse Eugene Russell "Father of 2G" Communications

Nana's Commentary:

How often do we hear this being said, "Why do you need Black History Month? What did Blacks ever do?" We gotta learn our story so we can answer this and many other questions, right and exact. So check out Jesse Eugene Russell. Remember his name and what he did.

RIGHT BACK ATCHA!!!

CONSIDERED THE “FATHER OF 2G COMMUNICATIONS”, HE PIONEERED AND IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE FIELD OF DIGITAL CELLULAR COMMUNICATION AND DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY. THIS MAN FUNDAMENTALLY AFFECTED THE WAY THE MODERN CELLPHONE WORKS AND HOW WE TALK TO EACH OTHER TODAY. HOW DID THIS MAN CHANGE OUR LIVES?

Jesse Eugene Russell

Born 1948, Nashville, Tennessee. Though coming from a large family and economically/socially challenged neighborhood, Russell overcame those odds to attend Tennessee State University where he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1972. Interesting to note, Russell is the first African American to be hired directly from a “Historically Black University” by AT&T Bell Labs after earning his B.S. He would go on to earn a Master of Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 1973.

Jesse Eugene Russell

Continuing his work at Bell Labs, some of his greatest contributions involve his part in introducing the U.S. (and by extension, the world) to digital cellular technology. Until his involvement, AT&T’s Cellular Radio division was sort of bleeding money. The company had this technology, but the only practical consumer application at the time was for car phones. Russell suggested the idea of taking the phones out of the car and putting them on the people, thus creating truly mobile phones. Only problem was, there were more people than cars, and the specific spectrum these car phones were on wouldn’t be able to handle the bandwidth.

Fortunately for the team, Russell had already become the leading expert in digital signal processing. Russell came up with a few solutions to this technical problem; this included completely digitizing speech, which significantly reduced bandwidth by using certain modulation schemes and allowed 4 times the number of people on the same spectrum. The technology took approximately from 1984-1988 for Russell and Bell Labs to complete, and was the first digital cellular system in any place in the world. Hear it from the man himself:

Russell had a successful career at Bell Labs, climbing to leadership positions such as the Director of the AT&T Cellular Telecommunication Laboratory (Bell Labs), Vice President of Advanced Wireless Technology Laboratory (Bell Labs), Chief Technical Officer for the Network Wireless Systems Business Unit (Bell Labs), Chief Wireless Architect of AT&T, and Vice President of Advanced Communications Technologies for AT&T Laboratories. He also struck out on his own as current CEO of incNETWORKS (starting in 2000), one of the tech leaders in MicroLTE product platforms for 4G.

He also has over 100 patents under his belt over the course of his career, including some big ones:

• Advanced multi-network client device for wideband multimedia access to private and public wireless networks
• Broadband cable telephony network architecture IP ITN network architecture reference model
• Wireless communication base station
• Wireless terminal having digital radio processing with automatic communication system selection capability
• Wireless communication system having base units which extracts channel and setup information from nearby base units
• Mobile data telephone
• Base station for mobile radio telecommunications systems

SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA

SOURCE: THE HISTORY MAKERS

SOURCE: VIMEO

SOURCE: HUDSON VALLEY PRESS

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