Happy Birthday GSM. It will be 20 years ago tomorrow that 15 telecommunications operators from 13 countries agreed to develop the world’s first global mobile phone system.
According to London-based analysts, The Mobile World, there are now over 3 billion mobile phones in use worldwide, and roughly half the world’s population is expected to own a mobile phone before the end of the year. Of the 3 billion phones, more than 2.5 billion are based on GSM or the updated 3GSM standard.
What marked GSM out from any previous mobile phone system was its ambition. From the outset it was designed to be used while traveling abroad, at first within the countries of the European Union and ultimately across the globe. And along with this came its renaming from Groupe Spécial Mobile to Global System for Mobile communications.
As it happens, however, GSM was not the first mobile phone system to allow cross-border use. This distinction went to B Netz based on technology from Dutch electronics giant Philips, but its area of use was limited to German speaking countries in Europe. The Nordic Mobile Telephone system which allowed roaming between Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden also predated GSM. There is some controversy about whether these were genuine roaming arrangements, however, as inter-carrier billing was very rudimentary if carried out at all.
GSM and 3GSM are today used by 700 mobile operators in 218 countries and territories. The global mobile services market accounts for about 1.6 percent of global GDP, as mobile users purchase more than 1 billion new handsets, make more than 7 trillion minutes of calls and send about 2.5 trillion text messages every year, according to data from GSM Association, the industry trade body.
“GSM is the single most important agreement in the history of telecommunications,” said Sir Christopher Gent, one of the original signatories of the agreement and former CEO of the world’s largest international mobile phone network operator Vodafone. “With 2.5 billion users around the world today, it has done more to bridge the digital divide than any other innovation, and is a tremendous example of global cooperation.”
GSM may have been a European invention but the mobile phone itself was a U.S. invention. The earliest patents are for pay phones mounted in railway cars and date back as far as the 19th century. Instead of radio technology, these early mobile phones used the railway tracks as signal carriers. The earliest radio-based devices appeared in the 1940s based on wartime radio technology.
It was also during World War II that Bell Labs developed the idea of cellular radio on which all modern mobile phone systems are based. It took almost 30 years, however, for semiconductors and batteries to mature sufficiently for the concept to be turned into a reality with the first cellular radio systems, albeit analogue technology based, appearing in Japan (NTT) and the U.S.A. (AT&T) to be followed soon after by Europe (NMT).