Who invented the mobile phone?

Answer

Hello,

It is a fact that communication is very important in our society. Technicians and scientists are looking for ever better possibilities. In the past you had communication via a wire, then via transmitters/receivers and satellites … but it was not possible to provide this in a small device. I still remember the ATF car telephone network in the 1980s. It was the Ericsson company that mastered the technology. There was the device of the Pollux and the Castor. Doctors in particular used this to receive calls from patients. This is seen by many as the real birth of mobile telephony. The devices were not small, especially because of the large battery that had to be carried along. The first pocket devices did not appear until the late 1980s.

The GSM standard finally makes digital telephony possible. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, introduced in 1973, is seen as the predecessor of the current mobile phone. Motorola had worked for fifteen years on the almost 1 kilo device, with a large antenna and talk time of about twenty minutes.

We had to wait a little longer for the first mobile phone network. RTT Telecom launched Kermit in 1992, later called Greenhopper due to copyrights. That is a kind of dect technology. Users had to be in the vicinity of a Greenpoint, which can be found at, among other things, NS stations. The masts had a range of 150 meters. When the network was shut down in 1999, there were 5,000 Greenpoints and 60,000 customers.

In 1994 the first GSM network is started by RTT. The Siemens P1, a black portable mobile phone with a large charging station for the battery, is used by KPN for the first tests in 1993. The device weighs more than 3 kilos. In 1999, the technology was well advanced and attractive devices were launched on the market, such as the Pocketline Darwin (Nokia 2110) and Pocketline Orion (Siemens C25). RTT Telecom starts shortly afterwards with the Swing of the Belgian/French Alcatel Alcatel.

After the start of RTT Telecom in 1994, mobile telephony only got off to a slow start. Vodafone (then Libertel) was launched in the autumn of 1995, and the other operators only followed after 1997. Umts, the successor to GSM, was chosen in 1998. In that year, the number of mobile phone users doubles from 10% to 20% of the population. From that moment on things go very fast, partly due to the increased competition. Now almost everyone has a cell phone.

Conclusion: It is the technology companies (Ericsson, Motorola, Siemens …) who invented the GSM … we can say again that thanks to technology the world can be improved … and it is the telephone/telecom/companies that have provided for the norms and standards. And actually it is the Italian inventor Marconi who laid the foundation of modern communication … also via GSM.

A nice website with even more explanation about the origin of the GSM can be found at http://www.schoieren.com/werkstukken/10937