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* First GSM call on July 1, 1991 marked start of a new era in global digital communications
On July 1, 1991, the world’s first GSM call on a commercial network was made between Finland’s former prime minister Harri Holkeri and vice mayor of the city of Tampere Kaarina Suonio (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkZn7jFd9Rc ). The first GSM network was built by Telenokia and Siemens – today’s Nokia Siemens Networks – for the Finnish operator Radiolinja, now operating under the name Elisa.
During the call, Harri Holkeri and Kaarina Suonio discussed the benefits of the new, digital, GSM technology, including superior voice quality and security, and the fact that the phone’s identity is in the SIM card, making it easy for consumers to choose the product they like.
The Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) was adopted in 1987 as the European standard for digital mobile technology. This second generation mobile technology could carry data as well as voice traffic. GSM’s high-quality voice calls, easy international roaming and support for new services such as text messaging (SMS) laid the foundations for a worldwide boom in mobile phone use.
In the following years, the number of GSM subscribers grew beyond all predictions. It reached more than 500 mln in the first decade to 2001. Today’s 838 GSM networks in 234 countries and independent territories around the world have more than 4.4 bln subscriptions. GSM is still growing fast, with 1 mln new GSM subscriptions added every day. That’s a rate of nearly 12 a second.
“GSM was the first digital technology based on open standards and one that made the widespread adoption of mobile phones possible,” said Pekka Soini, head of corporate development office at Nokia Siemens Networks.
“GSM continues to evolve and will be here in the coming decades together with 3G and LTE as an essential building block of the mobile broadband. We see continued GSM business opportunities in Single RAN Advanced capable hardware modernizations, high-quality voice capacity upgrades as well as smart device, machine-to-machine and high definition voice enhancements. The latest innovation announced in June this year, the Orthogonal Sub-Channel Dual Full Rate feature, is a software feature that allows up to 100% increase in voice capacity and significantly enhanced speech quality for GSM,” Soini continued.
Nokia Siemens Networks technology directly supports 2.9 bln subscribers – almost half of the world’s population – in 365 GSM networks in 143 countries. Nokia introduced its first digital handheld GSM phone, the Nokia 1011, in 1992. Other iconic models have included the Nokia 2110, while the most popular model has been the Nokia 1100, of which more than 250 mln have been sold.
