30th anniversary of world's first cellular service

Stuart Corner
Monday, 03 October 2011 08:35

Your IT - Mobility

The world's first cellular mobile telephone service, using the Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) technology was launched 30 years ago, on 1 October 1981 in Stockholm.

The first NMT exchange, supplied by Ericsson to Swedish telco Televerket (now TeliaSonera) was turned on in the Stockholm suburb of Hammarby and continued to operate for the next 27 years.

This despite cellular being a US invention that had had made its debut almost a decade earlier. Martin Cooper, general manager of Motorola's Communications Systems Division made the first cellular call, to his rival at AT&T's Bell Labs, from the streets of New York City on April 3 1973.

Australia was somewhat behind the times. Just a month prior to Televerket turning on its NMT system, Telstra (or Telecom as it then was) had launched Australia's first mobile service, but it was not cellular. Australia had to wait a further six years for its first cellular mobile network, which was built using the AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System) technology that originated in the US.

By this time the Europeans were well advanced in development of the GSM digital system. Work had started in 1982 and the first network was launched, in Germany, in 1991.

According to Håkan Dahlström, president of mobility services for TeliaSonera, "The Nordic NMT-system was groundbreaking, as it provided people in the Nordic countries a totally new possibility of mobile communication, says "The standard we built it on paved the way for GSM and modern mobile communication technology, which now serves a community of more than five billion users worldwide."

Ericsson and TeliaSonera have set up a web site tracing the development of NMT and its evolution to the present day 3G and forthcoming 4G technologies.