1G NETWORKS

1G (or 1-G) is short for first-generation wireless telephone technology, cellphones. These are the analog cellphone standards that were introduced in the 1980s and continued until being replaced by 2G digital cellphones. The main difference between two succeeding mobile telephone systems, 1G and 2G, is that the radio signals that 1G networks use are analog, while 2G networks are digital.

Although both systems use digital signaling to connect the radio towers (which listen to the handsets) to the rest of the telephone system, the voice itself during a call is encoded to digital signals in 2G whereas 1G is only modulated to higher frequency, typically 150MHz and up.