Happy Birthday GSM!!

Twenty years ago today 7th Sept, 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.

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.

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.

Source: Cellular News