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  GSM was intended to be launched on 1 July 1991. In fact it wasn’t really ready. But the bureaucratic miracle had to be witnessed, and a few symbolic conversations were organised: for example Harri Holkeri, the Governor of the Bank of Finland, phoned the mayor of Helsinki, and discussed the price of Baltic herring. But such fishy anecdotes aside, commercial GSM services did not really start until the following year. Eight countries – Germany, Denmark, Finland, France, the UK, Sweden, Portugal and Italy – began in 1992, and were soon joined by others, so that by 1995 European coverage was nearly complete. Indeed, several countries had more than one GSM operator. Remarkably, GSM then began to be adopted outside of Europe. By 1996, GSM phones could be found in 103 diverse countries, from Australia to Russia, from South Africa to Azerbaijan, and even in the United States.

  The GSM standard for digital cellular phones was a worldwide success. This shop in Dalston, London, specialises in GSM phones for African networks.

  European bureaucracy had scored an undoubted commercial hit. There were many factors behind the remarkable uptake of GSM. A feature of the history of standards is that success tends to create its own momentum. So, to take two notorious examples, the QWERTY keyboard and the VHS video system were both ‘chosen’ not because they were technically superior to their rivals (they weren’t), but because everyone else was already using them. GSM was not the only digital cellular standard on offer in the 1990s, but since a significant number of countries had already adopted it – albeit for political reasons – then it was a safer choice. The equipment was ready to buy, and experience showed that it worked well enough. But this dynamic is not by itself enough to explain GSM. The European digital standard benefited, bizarrely, from the chaos of what went before. Many different national systems at least produced a variety of technical possibilities from which to pick and choose. NMT provided a basic template onto which extra features – such as SIM cards, from Germany’s Netz-C – could be grafted. Furthermore, the relative failure of the first cellular phones in countries such as France, and especially Germany, created a pent-up demand that GSM could meet. In the United States, where customers were satisfied with the analogue standard, there was little demand for digital until spectrum space began to run out. Paradoxically, America lost the lead because its first generation of cellular phones was too successful.

  But more important still was how GSM satisfied both European customers and manufacturers. Recall that when I smashed up my old GSM phone I found that it consisted of many components. In the early 1990s technical trends, especially miniaturisation, led to a qualitative change in mobile terminal design. Suddenly, mobile phones became small and light enough to routinely carry around. (‘Handportables’ had existed before, but they were not cheap and certainly not easily manageable.) There was a leap from car phone to hand phone. Part and parcel of the same process, the new designs attracted new customers, and the mobile became less a business tool and much more an everyday object. The shift marks the start of the mobile as an object of mass culture and individual necessity. Three manufacturers soon dominated the mobile market. Spurred by competition between each other, Nokia of Finland, Ericsson of Sweden and the American Motorola designed and marketed ever smaller and cheaper phones.

  These companies, and European firms that supplied other parts of the GSM cellular networks, also benefited from the fortunate outcome of a patents battle. Aware that such a complex system as GSM might rely on patents that may only be discovered, ruinously, at a later date, European planners of GSM insisted in 1988 that manufacturers indemnify themselves against the risk. Although the demand was later watered down, many manufacturers, including the mighty Far East conglomerates and most US firms, decided to sit GSM out. This obscure legal controversy had the effect of reducing competition and massively strengthening the firms amenable to agreement: Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola. (Motorola had European factories.) Select manufacturing interests were therefore happy with GSM. These factors were as important in pushing GSM forward as pan-European political motives had been for starting the ball rolling.

  Chapter 8

  Digital America divided

  Only when too many American analogue cellphone users were cramming into the available spectrum space did attention seriously turn to launching a digital standard that could compete with GSM. In the spirit of free market competition, a number of alternative approaches were proposed.

  Imagine you have 30 people at a great party, all on the same cellphone network and all calling their friends. If they all tried to use the same frequency at once, then no one would be able to talk. This was the problem confronted by the telecommunications engineers at the very end of the 1980s – except that the party could be the size of Chicago or New York. There are several solutions. Each party-goer could be allocated a tiny sliver of frequency of which they had sole use. This solution, called Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA), only works so far as you can slice up the scarce frequency bands thin enough without affecting operation. In practice, you soon run into problems. So another solution is to not broadcast all the conversation. For example, take a second of transmission. By devoting the first thirtieth of a second to the conversation from the first party-goer, the second thirtieth of a second to that of the second party-goer, and so on, a small part of every phone call from the party is transmitted. A trick is played on each listener – they don’t notice the gaps! This technique, easy by digital methods, is called Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), since you are dividing up the transmission into different time slots and letting lots of callers access it.

  A third possibility is much harder to explain. It is best attacked from a different direction. Imagine someone at the party wanted to have a secret, illicit conversation. The caller could borrow a technique from the shadowy world of codebreaking. By mixing up the information that coded the secret conversation with a seemingly random signal, and transmitting the mixture together, then the caller could ensure that even when this was mixed in with other messages using the time division method, the receiver at the other end – if they knew what the random signal was – could unpick the original message. What this method – called Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) loses in simplicity, it gains in privacy. The invention of CDMA had its roots in San Diego County, where there existed a fruitful interplay between military contractors and top electronic research centres, such as the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Irwin Jacobs and Andrew J. Viterbi had met at UCSD in the 1960s and launched Linkabit, a military communications company, in 1968. In 1985 they sold out and started again with Qualcomm, through which Jacobs and Viterbi hoped to commercialise another product of the Californian military-industrial complex: CDMA, a concept that had been developed when Linkabit had been asked to develop a satellite modem for the United States Air Force. Qualcomm had the skills to take CDMA from its military setting and to reap the considerable profits of entering the consumer communications market. (There was also a contract from the Hughes aerospace giant to help things along.) Nevertheless Qualcomm needed considerable powers of persuasion, since the decision was taken in 1992, on competition grounds, to allow both TDMA- and CDMA-based standards to proceed despite CDMA coming late to the party. The result was that the United States yet again resembled a patchwork, this time of a variety of incompatible digital standards.

  This pattern of division and fracture lasted until 2005 and the launch of Apple’s iPhone. For deep reasons – rooted in Apple’s culture of end-to-end control of how users experience their electronic products, which will be discussed later – once the iPhone had achieved its remarkable success, American cellphone culture began to look and feel different. Nevertheless, there was still a divergence between the United States and the rest of the world, especially the developing world: while by 2009 over 85 per cent of Americans possessed one, they remain more reluctant to rely on their cellphone, or even to use it routinely, compared to many non-Americans. Some, although very few,
reject the compulsion for a life in constant touch. Nevertheless, it is the old, the poor and the less educated who are less likely to have a cellphone at all. The technology, too, best exemplified by the iPhone, reflects divergent values. Writing for the New York Times in 2010, Anand Giridharadas neatly summed it up when reflecting on American cellphone culture on his return from a visit to India:

  Not for the first time, America and the rest of the world are moving in different ways. America’s innovators, building for an ever-expanding bandwidth network, are spiralling toward fancier, costlier, more network-hungry and status-giving devices; meanwhile, their counterparts in developing nations are innovating to find ever more uses for cheap, basic cellphones.

  Chapter 9

  Mob rule: competition and class in the UK

  In the early 1990s, on trains across Britain, something exceedingly disturbing was happening. People were talking. Loudly. The anger, generated amongst unwilling eavesdroppers and aimed at the mobile owners cheerfully declaring that they were ‘on the train’, was a sure indicator that an invisible social boundary had been transgressed. In the early 19th century, the stagecoach had been alive with gossip and chatter, as the novels of Jane Austen or the essays of William Hazlitt record. With the arrival of the steam locomotive, however, the talk stopped. Partly the smooth, speedy – almost unworldly – motion of the railway carriage on iron tracks was more conducive to contemplation of the landscape outside the window than to discussion with fellow passengers. Trains transported the body and the mind. But a more severe problem lay with those passengers themselves. Who were they? Railways were symbols of an industrial age, and in the sprawling industrial city people became increasingly anonymous. Although the division of carriages into different classes – first, second and third – gave some clues, it remained extremely awkward to strike up a conversation on a ‘suitable’ note. Rather than commit a social gaffe, travellers on trains in Britain chose silence.

  ‘I’m on Westminster Bridge.’ Telecom Pearl in 1986. (BT Archives)

  Delicate issues of class had created social protocols of communication – rules governing when to speak and what could be said, rules that may never have been written down but were more powerful for all that. Against a century and a half of mutually-sanctioned quiet ran a device created by a new set of protocols. GSM, at heart, was also a set of rules governing communication. But these were hard and explicit, and individuals – not society – accepted them upon the purchase of a cellular phone. It was the individual, not society, that spoke loudly: ‘I’m on the train.’ Listeners were annoyed not only because the older tacit rules had been broken, but because their particular complaint against the owner of the mobile phone was of selfishness. How dare they disturb everyone else! What makes their conversation so necessary, so important, to justify shattering the collective trance? What makes them so special? Indeed, the history of mobile phones in Britain is intimately entwined with social transformations, class transgressions and competition – not only between technical systems but also between the politics of selfish individuality and the social bonds that tie us.

  In the summer of 1954, the Marquess of Donnegall was jealous. The Duke of Edinburgh, he had heard, possessed a telephone built into a car. The Marquess’s information was correct. The Duke’s Lagonda coupé sports car had a radio telephone with which, via an Admiralty frequency and a Pye relay station up on the Hampstead hills in north London, he could speak directly to Buckingham Palace. He enjoyed this perk of the job, as the breezy Daily Sketch told its royal-friendly readership: ‘The Duke takes a keen delight in making surprise calls to the Queen ... Sometimes he disguises his voice when speaking to Charles and Anne.’ (The newspaper also hinted at fears concerning the combination of royalty and speeding cars: ‘He is a skilful driver but some concern was felt that he should use so fast a model,’ while adding the reassuring statistic that the Duke, as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, held the unofficial record among his fellow naval officers for the 98-mile run from Bath to London. In his 12hp MG he had covered the distance in one hour and 40 minutes.)

  The Marquess of Donegall asked the Post Office whether such a radio telephone could connect to the public network, and if so, whether he could also have a set. The Post Office’s reply is revealing in what it tells us about British mobile radio telephones in the mid-1950s:

  You probably know it is possible for passengers on certain ships to make radio-telephone calls to the United Kingdom public telephone system; and shipping in the Thames, if provided with the appropriate equipment, can also call on-shore telephones. There is, however, no arrangement for private persons to fit radio in their own vessels or vehicles for communication with the public telephone network. The prospect of starting such a service in the United Kingdom in the present state of technical knowledge in the radio field are nil. There is no room in the radio frequency spectrum.

  Actually the Duke’s car phone could have been connected to the public telephone system – experiments had proven this capability, but the Duke had baulked at the cost. While it was ‘Post Office policy to refuse the connection of radio calls from privately operated services (which include those established by police, fire, and public utility organisations) because of the difficulty of maintaining the necessary standard of transmission’, an exception could be made for a person of appropriate social standing. In the mid-1950s, if you were the husband of the Queen then you could have a mobile telephone connection to the public telephone network. But if you were a mere Marquess you could go whistle.

  But, aside from the finer points of social rank, the Post Office’s reply also illustrates the typical sentiments of a public telecoms monopoly. It looked inward, rather than outward. The Post Office was more concerned to preserve the integrity of the network than to be led by – or even concede to – customer demands. Early users of mobile radio in Britain included the travelling car-repair services (such as the Automobile Association or the Royal Automobile Club), taxi firms (particularly in the capital, such as RadioCabs (London) Ltd), and industrial companies whose facilities were dispersed widely and in far-flung places (such as Esso Petroleum Ltd). Even banded together to form the Mobile Radio Users’ Association, they were powerless against the might of the public telecoms monopoly. In 1954, for example, the mobile users were kicked off their frequencies because the government wanted to create room in the spectrum for the commercial rival to the BBC, ITV. The Post Office consistently (with few exceptions, not least the case of the Queen’s husband) refused to consider connection of mobile radio to the telephone network. By 1968, when, against two decades of Post Office disinterest, there were 6,100 private mobile systems licensed, a total of about 74,000 stations altogether, and a growth rate of 17 per cent per year, the official attitude was still that the integrity of the telephone network was paramount and any interconnection of the noisy, anarchic mobile radio to the state-owned system could barely be countenanced: ‘The policy of refusing connection of private mobile systems to the public network has lasted nearly 20 years. From the [official] point of view the argument for maintaining this refusal is as strong as ever.’

  The London Radiophone Service was launched by a call from the Postmaster General (the government minister responsible for post and telecommunications) to the TV presenter Richard Dimbleby. The service was not a cellular system but allowed callers to connect to the public telephone network via an operator at the Tate Gallery Telephone Exchange and base stations at Kelvedon Hatch (near Brentwood, north-east of London), Bedmond (near King’s Langley, north of London) and Beulah Hill (in Croydon, South London). (BT Archives)

  Actually, by the mid-1960s the Post Office had begun, reluctantly, to change its policy on interconnection. An experimental South Lancashire Radiophone Service had begun around Manchester, Liverpool and Preston in 1959. In 1965, an extremely exclusive and expensive service, called System 1, had been launched in the well-to-do Pimlico area of West London. It was
used by the chauffeurs of diplomats and company chairmen. The radio set cost £350, the service cost over seven pounds a quarter year, and calls cost one shilling and threepence for three minutes. Two years later, the emergency services were allowed to connect to the telephone network. Indeed, the mobile telephone had begun to trickle down the British class system. On the eve of the introduction of cellular phones, a privileged 14,000 used the later (non-cellular) System 4 mobile telephones. The TeKaDe terminal alone cost £3,000 and the annual subscription was a quarter of this sum again. Car ownership is a good indicator of status, and most users of System 4 drove a Rolls-Royce, BMW, Mercedes or Range Rover.

  A class act all round. Woman in a Rolls-Royce Corniche, with radiophone, 1975. (BT Archives)

  The later story of mobile phones in Britain only makes sense in the context of the political transformations instigated by Margaret Thatcher, who was elected as prime minister in 1979. The early years of her Conservative administration were decidedly shaky. She had ditched the consensus politics of her forebears in favour of rolling back the state and a brutal regime of monetarist economics. Unemployment shot up. Riots flared in London, Liverpool and other cities. Her drastic experiment on Britain would almost certainly have ended in defeat if it were not for two factors. First, the unexpected war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands rekindled nationalist emotions that few, in particular the ineffectual Labour party in opposition, suspected still existed. Second, Thatcherism made an even stronger appeal to the purse than to the nationalist heart. In rolling back the state, Margaret Thatcher realised that the privatisation of state-owned resources released money, in the form of stocks and shares, that could be given to the voter. A virtuous cycle of greed was set up, in which industry was liberalised and individuals enriched. It was to be an experiment in class and competition.