Today marks the 20th anniversary of the first mobile phone call and the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) standard that was born from it!
That’s right folks, on July 1st 1991, the mobile phone era began. Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri made the first ever mobile phone call using (yep, you guessed it) a Nokia-made mobile phone and the GSM mobile network.
Fast forward 20 years on and you’ll find it hard to know somebody who doesn’t have a mobile phone. GSM connects 1.5 billion people in 212 countries, providing the ability to make a mobile phone call for 80% of the planet’s mobile phone market.
The GSM standard has provided us with a number of new innovations over the years, and has shaped the concept of mobile phones and mobile calling that we know today. The Subscriber Identity Module (better known as the SIM card) was introduced to be used with GSM, giving users the ability to keep one dedicated phone number but switch freely between different mobile phones. Thanks to GSM we also managed to cram more data into less mobile space, resulting in clearer voice quality on mobile phone calls.
If it wasn’t for the introduction of GSM, you wouldn’t be able to ‘txt ur m8s’ either. The Short Messaging System (SMS), better known as text messaging, was first introduced using the GSM standard. Mobile internet was also launched using GSM, with GPRS and EDGE signal types coming first, followed by the 3G and HSPA we still use today.
As a final point and a piece of bonus knowledge, the chap you’ll see at the top of this post is Martin Cooper, and that huge telephone in his hand is the very first handheld mobile phone. Thanks to his hard work with Motorola, the development of the mobile phone that we know, love and rely on today began way back in 1973.
So let’s thank Martin Cooper and those who developed the GSM standard into what it is today, for without them we probably wouldn’t be able to make video calls with our mobile phones, or download a YouTube video to your phone while you’re out shopping.