Standards have aided adoption of wireless products by enabling interoperability among different vendors.
This tutorial applet demonstrates how the process of encoding and decoding CDMA user signals works. The user interface is in German but it is fairly easy to understand that the applet is combining data from four users.
This film from the AT&T archives provides and explanation of the original analog cellular phone system. It provides and interesting description of the limited mobile phone system that existed before cellular phones were developed, as well as describing the original AMPS service and the "cellular" concept, which still applies today.
Wireless Communications, Second Edition is the definitive professional's overview of wireless communications technology and system design. Building on his classic first edition, Theodore S. Rappaport reviews virtually every important new wireless standard and technological development, including W-CDMA, cdma2000, UMTS, and UMC 136/EDGE; IEEE 802.11 and HIPERLAN WLANs; Bluetooth, LMDS, and more. Includes dozens of practical new examples, solved step by step.
The stated purpose of this tutorial from the University of Edinburgh is to give a simple introduction to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. This is a somewhat technical OFDM demo.