NMT was the first mobile phone network to feature international roaming and is today thought of as the first generation of mobile telephone, 1G. But already when NMT was brand new, the industry looked towards building even more advanced systems for mobile telephony.
In December 1982, a European cross-company group, initially called Groupe Spécial Mobile, or GSM, gathered in Stockholm for its first official meeting at Swedish PTT Televerket, in fact in the same building in which the NMT group had held its inaugural meeting 12 years earlier.
Work on the European GSM and the Nordic NMT standards continued as separate projects during the 1980s. The 12 years devoted to NMT gave the Scandinavians a lead: many of the questions that had been resolved by the Nordic collaboration now came up again on a European basis, and some Nordic representatives were working in both groups. Ericsson engineers, of course, were among those.
The task assigned to the GSM group was worded ”harmonization of the technical and operational specifications for a mobile public communication system in the 900 MHz band”.
GSM technology meant the start yet again of a miniaturization process. Technologically, GSM was much more advanced than NMT, and also required much more miniaturization, since the aim was to produce a much smaller GSM phone than the rather clunky NMT phones. There were also similarities between the systems. Just as with NMT, key concepts for GSM was openness and flexibility, along with scalability and a modular construction.
Afterwards, even the members of the GSM group were surprised that the system became so widespread. By end of 1993, 70 operators from 48 countries had signed a memorandum of understanding and 25 roaming agreements had been signed. And the following year saw the real commercial breakthrough. By 1995, the number of GSM subscribers exceeded 10 million. Twice as many mobile phones were sold in 1995 as during the entire 1980s. (For the sake of comparison, in 1992 the Internet had 10 million users and 40 million in 1995.)
GSM was a European system though. GSM was never introduced in Japan. And America adopted CDMA as an American mobile phone standard in 1993. GSM did break through in the USA, though, after a long process 1997–1999 in which Ericsson persuaded AT&T Wireless to switch technologies.
Eventually, the growth of GSM beat all predictions. In 1998, the number of GSM subscribers totaled 100 million. At the end of the decade two years later, the figure was 465 million – more than the number of internet users.
Bonus reading: Bluetooth
Today, people across the world connect devices to other devices using Bluetooth. That’s an Ericsson technology they then are using. The seed leading to Bluetooth’s creation was planted by Nils Rydbeck, Chief Technology Officer at Ericsson Mobile, and Johan Ullman, a Swedish physician and inventor.
Initially, Bluetooth was only meant to be a better alternative to wired connection for wireless voice. Named after the 10th-century Viking Harald Blåtand (“Bluetooth” in direct translation), Bluetooth allows devices to create small networks called piconets and transmit data using radio waves in the 2.4 GHz band. It enables a central device like a smartphone to send or request data from peripheral devices like headsets or speakers, for example, which can then share data with the central device.
In 2001, the first widely available Bluetooth consumer device, Ericsson’s T39 phone, hit the mass market.