TORONTO – Mobile communication has become one of the most important technological innovations of all time and an important driver for economic and social development, said Swedish telecom manufacturer Ericsson today.
The company celebrated a half-century in mobile telephony today by marking its introduction of the world’s first automatic mobile telephone system in 1956, "a breakthrough that has dramatically changed the way people communicate with each other. Fifty years on, more than 2.5 billion people in the world now own a mobile phone," says the Ericsson release.
"Today, mobile communication is part of everyday life for nearly a third of the world’s population. Back in the days of our founder, Lars Magnus Ericsson, people were already saying that communication is a fundamental human need," said company president and CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg.
The world’s first fully automatic system, simply called Mobile Telephony A (MTA), was used by a few hundred subscribers, mostly such salaried professionals as lawyers and doctors in Stockholm and Gothenburg, Sweden. Requiring no manual control of any kind, users only had to dial numbers on a telephone to make a call.
Built for the Swedish Telecommunications Administration (now TeliaSonera), the system operated in the 160MHz band using pulsed signaling between the terminal and base station and it could handle about 100 users apiece.
Early mobile telephony was synonymous with car phones or voice communication over a mobile radio in a car, and the equipment was a far cry from the digital pocket-sized devices people now enjoy. The associated MTA radio equipment weighed more than 40kg and was only designed with installation in the trunk of a vehicle in mind (Remember William Conrad in Cannon? His big Lincoln had one like the one pictured).
In 1981, Ericsson launched the first modern mobile telephony system, Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT). Ericsson was also the driver of the GSM global standard, says the relea
se, which was introduced in 1991 as a Pan-European mobile system and later evolved into a true global one. In 2001, 3G was introduced as an evolution of GSM to provide mobile broadband services offering up to 3.6 Mbps. Today, more than two billion people all over the world are connected via GSM.
The 50th anniversary of the event is being celebrated on October 17 with the inauguration of Fifty Years of Mobile Telephony, a month-long telephony exhibition in Stockholm, Sweden. This will be accompanied by an international conference on October 26, also in Stockholm.
