GSM cellular services are 20 years old today

Stuart Corner
Friday, 01 July 2011 14:41

Your IT - Mobility

Nokia Siemens Networks has reminded us that the first GSM call on a commercial network was made between Finland's former prime minister Harri Holkeri and vice mayor of the city of Tampere Kaarina Suonio on1 July 1991.

"The first GSM network was built by Telenokia and Siemens - today's Nokia Siemens Networks - for the Finnish operator Radiolinja, now operating under the name Elisa," Nokia Siemens says.

GSM - today an acronym for Global System for Mobile communications but at the time for Groupe Speciale Mobile - had been adopted in 1987 as the European standard for digital mobile technology.

Today 3G networks like those in Australia are part of the same GSM family of technologies and, according to Nokia Siemens, "In the following years, the number of GSM subscribers grew beyond all predictions. It reached more than 500 million in the first decade to 2001. Today's 838 GSM networks in 234 countries and independent territories around the world have more than 4.4 billion subscriptions. GSM is still growing fast, with one million new GSM subscriptions added every day. That's a rate of nearly 12 a second."

In November 1990, the Australian Government accepted telecommunications regulator Austel's recommendation that GSM be the digital cellular technology for Australia, but gave Austel the opportunity to reconsider GSM in the face of emerging technologies. At the time, the choice was far from clear cut. Telstra (Telecom) operated an analogue AMPS network and there was a digital evolution of that, D-AMPS. Also up and coming was the Qualcomm CDMA technology. However the decision to go with GSM was confirmed in March 1990.

For anyone interested in a blow by blow account of the development of GSM, Stephen Temple of the UK, who was elected chair of the Chairman of the Technical Assembly of the European Telecommunications standards Institute in 1988, has written and published, in 2010, a detailed blow-by blow account of the complex and lengthy negotiations between European nations that lead to the signing of the MoU.

In the foreword, he says "Shortly after the launch of GSM (in 1991) would have been an ideal time to publish the story. A close friend and former [UK Department of Trade and Industry] colleague Jonathan Phillips stayed up one night and read the manuscript. His red ink over the draft said it all. There was no way it would have got official approval for publication without ripping out the very heart of the story 'the political dynamics'. The story was to remain hidden behind the Official Secrets Act for the next 17 years gathering dust." The publication, which runs to about 120 pages, is available as a free download from http://www.gsmhistory.com.