Mobiles yes, but Tesla clearly seems to think (at least according to this article) that there will be no 'intermediaries', that the transmissions are 'station-to-station' (or peer-to-peer as we'd say nowadays) instead of the way the cell phone network actually works, with calls using fixed base stations plugged in to the trunk lines.

Station-to-station would indeed require transmission without loss, and power loss for a transmitter is roughly equivalent to the cube of the distance for an omni-directional antenna.

That doesn't diminish the power of this vision, but even Tesla had to abide by the laws of physics.

One 'Nathan B. Stubblefield' apparently holds a 1908 patent on a wireless telephone: http://www.google.com/patents?q=887357