1st July marks the 20thanniversary of the first phone call made over GSM – the Global System for Mobile communications. The call on 1st July 1991– between Finland’s former prime minister, Harri Holkeri, and the mayor of Tampere, Kaarina Suonio – took place over a network jointly developed by Telenokia and Siemens Networks, the two companies that joined to form today’s Nokia Siemens Networks. It was made using a Nokia Mobira car phone.
The main topic of the phone conversation was how much better this new standard for digital communications was than the old analogue phones they’d used before. GSM offered much better call quality and security against snooping. It also saw the advent of the SIM card, the main advantage of which remains the ease with which it became possible to switch phones.
Of course, the success of GSM was beyond anyone’s expectations. It reached more than 500 million subscribers in the first decade to 2001. Today GSM networks have more than 4.4 billion subscriptions. And the figure is still growing fast, with 1 million new GSM subscriptions every day. That’s a rate of nearly 12 a second.
There’s no sign of that changing very soon, either. The latest and greatest technologies for faster mobile communications, like EDGE, 3G and LTE are all evolutionary, based on the standards laid down by GSM.
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