GSM Celebrates its 20th Birthday
Twenty years ago tomorrow (Friday), an historic agreement was signed in Copenhagen by 15 telecommunications operators from 13 countries that led to the development of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), and a mobile communications industry that today serves more than 2.5 billion people across 218 countries and territories.
The 'Memorandum of Understanding' agreement of 7th September 1987 laid the foundation for the first Europe-wide digital cellular system, which soon became the world's first global mobile system as used by more than 700 mobile operators and served by thousands of suppliers today. The agreement also triggered a technology evolution path that continues today with the roll-out of more than 120 mobile broadband networks in 61 countries.
GSM - originally known as Groupe Special Mobile was designed to provide a single mobile phone standard within Europe to replace the multiple of incompatible analogue systems in use at the time. It was ironically, never designed as a global system from the outset, but was later adopted by other countries, initially Australia's Telstra for their phone systems and eventually the Groupe Special Mobile became the Global System for Mobile Communications.
In 1989, GSM responsibility was transferred to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and phase I of the GSM specifications were published in 1990.
The first GSM network was launched in 1991 by Radiolinja in Finland with joint technical infrastructure maintenance from Ericsson. It was in June 1992 that the first roaming agreement was signed between Telecom Finland and Vodafone in the UK.
The first US based GSM network was launched later in November 1995, on the GSM1900 band by American Personal Communications - trading as Sprint Spectrum, and was initially 49% (later 100%) owned by Sprint which later launched a national CDMA network, abandoning its early GSM heritage in 1999.
"The 1987 agreement is widely regarded as the foundation of today's global mobile phone industry and the birth of one of the greatest technological achievements of our age," said Rob Conway, CEO of the GSMA, the global trade association for mobile operators. "The early vision of our industry created international cooperation on an unprecedented scale that has led to a socio-economic revolution benefiting people, businesses and countries throughout the world."
Today, the GSM family of technologies makes up 85% of the global mobile services market, which accounts for about 1.6% of global GDP. Each year, mobile users purchase more than one billion new handsets, make more than 7 trillion minutes of calls and send about 2.5 trillion text messages.
The original 'MoU' agreement was signed on 7th September 1987 by France, Italy, Germany, UK, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, and on the 10th September 1987 by Spain.
Posted to the site on 6th September 2007
