Mobile telephony

Mobile telephony is the practise of providing telephone service to handsets that are not tethered to a single place but are instead capable of moving freely from one spot to another. Despite the fact that the term "telephony" is meant to refer only to a connection or service that is only capable of supporting voice communications, there are instances in which this distinction gets blurred.

Mobile phones link to a cellular network that is based on the ground and consists of base stations (cell sites), while satellite phones connect to satellites in space. Both networks are coupled to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), which enables users to call any phone in the globe from any other phone in the world.

As of 2010, it was projected that there were five billion mobile cellular subscribers in countries all over the globe.