Evolution of Mobile Communications in Turkey from Car Phones to 5G: A Technical Review of Base Station Antennas, Frequency Bands, Spectrum Allocation, and Network Infrastructure

This review traces Turkey’s mobile communication evolution from car phones to the commercial 5G phase launched on 1 April 2026. It combines a generation-based engineering matrix with an auditable framework covering spectrum, antenna/radio integration, RAN and core architecture, transport, performance objectives, trade-offs, costs, and evidence limits. Its quantitative synthesis uses 1990s ETSI standards, KPI targets, antenna parameters, regulatory comparisons, link budget illustrations, BTK 2026-Q1 indicators, and a deliberately limited single-point handset observation. At equal distance, free-space path loss at 3.5 GHz is 13.98 dB higher than at 700 MHz; for an illustrative path loss exponent of 3.5, the cell radius and coverage area ratios are about 0.40 and 0.159. The 2025 authorization comprises 60 MHz of paired 700 MHz spectrum and 340 MHz of 3.5 GHz TDD spectrum. The international comparison is limited to regulatory spectrum positioning and a common date fixed-broadband fiber proxy, not user-experienced performance or deployment maturity. BTK data demonstrate market and infrastructure scale, but nationwide province- and operator-level radio, latency, synchronization, energy, outage, and SA/NSA data remain unavailable. The evidence supports a pragmatic coverage-first low-/mid-band launch whose practical performance depends on site density, active antennas, fiber backhaul, synchronization, energy resilience, and legacy band refarming.