The first step into mobility was taken thirty years ago.
NMT, Nordic Mobile Telephony, was the first generation of mobile telephony and
by today’s standards, the bulky telephones are humorous – little did we know
then, it was the start of the revolution enabling global mobility.
NMT launched in 1981. In Sweden, the NMT network was shut
down on the last day of 2007. The prefix “010” that signified the
mobile network is now used as a prefix for corporate exchanges – Ericsson among
them.
Televerket, which later became TeliaSonera, was an
especially strong advocate of the technology. Ericsson, as a main supplier, was
driven to support its customer. Today, the two are still pioneers, being first
in the world to launch a commercial 4G network and developing the vision of the
Networked Society.
“The Nordic NMT-system was groundbreaking, as it
provided people in the Nordic countries a totally new possibility of mobile
communication,” said Hakan Dahlström, president of Mobility Services,
TeliaSonera.
“The standard we built it on paved the way for GSM
and modern mobile communication technology, which now serves a community of
more than 5 billion users worldwide. It is a remarkable achievement that no one
could ever dream of. And customer demand for communication continues to
explode,” Dahlstrom added.
“The evolution since then has been dramatic. Today,
mobile communication is so much more for so many more people. It is an
essential part of our daily life, all over the world,” said Johan Wibergh,
head of Ericsson’s Business Unit Networks.
“Our vision of a Networked Society is where people,
business and society benefit from using more than 50 billion connected devices.
Back in 1981, this was unthinkable. Now it’s close to happening and it’s
incredibly exciting,” Wibergh added.
By Telecomlead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com
