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The 'Radio Telephone Network C' (German: 'Funktelefonnetz-C'), abbreviated as 'C-Net' (German: 'C-Netz'), was a first generation analog cellular phone system deployed by Germany's (formerly Deutsche Bundespost Telekom, currently T-Mobile) utilizing the 'C450' cellular standard. ^[1] It was the third and last update of a series of analog mobile phone systems used primarily within Germany, superseding the former B-Netz analog mobile standard. It has been decommissioned, replaced by both the newer D-Net (GSM-900) and E-Net (GSM-1800) systems.

Contents

Timeline

Technical Information

Roaming

Future Use

References

See Also

Timeline

The C-Net was officially introduced in 1985 (with unofficial trials in 1984) to replace the existing B-Net and B2-Net systems used in Germany at the time. Due to the cumbersome operation of existing B-Net mobile networks, early adoption of C-Net was very high, especially in rural areas which had lacked prior B-Net coverage.
By December of 1988, the service had grown to nearly 100,000 customers. It remained popular throughout the 1990s as a preferred system for mobile car phones. However, the system was loosing customers quickly by 1999, dropping from 230,000 customers in October to 210,000 customers in November. ^[2]
Eventually, Germany's C-Net service was shut down on December 31, 2000. Some cells near the German-Dutch border remained active for several more months but were eventually discontinued as well.

Technical Information

Main articles: C450

The C450 standard was developed by Siemens in 1980. It is a 1G analog cellular standard that utilized non-audible in-band signaling, audio scrambling via band-inversion and cell network call queuing when congested. Cellular nodes varied in size, supporting a primary cell size of 15-20 km and micro-cells of 2-3 km in size. Channel bandwidth was typically 20 kHz, although it could be operated in a narrow-band mode of only 12 kHz. As its name implies, it was designed for the 450 MHz UHF frequency range.

Roaming

The C-Net's C450 standard was a heterogeneous cellular system that inhibited International roaming. France used the RadioCom 2000 analog standard while Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland used the NMT-450 analog standard.
Austria's own C-Net system utilized the NMT standard, not C450. This differs from previous systems used in Austria (A-Net, B-Net) that were based on German standards.

Future Use

The C-Net radio spectrum in Germany has been reallocated for use with Flarion's Flash-OFDM mobile networking standard. It will primarily be used to service Germany's rail service with Internet connectivity under the name Railnet.

References

1. User Contributed Supplement, History of Cellular, Private Line Magazine
2. Modeling, simulation and analysis of distributed business processes (German)

See Also

★ A-Net

★ B-Net

★ D-Net

★ E-Net