When was gsm developed

When Mr. His task was to develop a new digital mobile telephone system for Scandinavia as a replacement for the NMT system. Before long, the Scandinavians merged with a pan-European project with the same goal.

At first, disagreements nearly crippled the entire integration process. Eventually, the EU intervened, and in the ball started rolling again. Several of the participating countries had long been working on their own systems and had developed very strong opinions about the way things ought to be. The CEPT companies therefore agreed to choose a winner based on objective testing. In February , eight systems from five different countries — Germany, France, Sweden, Finland and Norway — were in the running for creating the new standard.

Eight cars were outfitted with equipment from each candidate system. The system that transmitted the most data with the fewest errors would win. At first, the international press did not think the Norwegian GSM contribution was likely to win. In September , the journal Communications Systems Worldwide wrote:. However, when the test was finished, the conclusion was clear: The Norwegian system was best.

The British popular science journal New Scientist confused the source of the Norwegian system slightly when it described the victory as follows: The winner was a surprise. He says that Odd Trandem had simulated the test situation in Paris with the Norwegian system after the results from the other tests had been made public. He was able to do this because the Norwegian entry was the last to be tested in the competition. Maseng says. All those trips around Orkdals fjord to measure how the system would handle reflected signals and radio interference from the valley walls had not been in vain.

And test rounds in Stockholm to see how the system would work in the city had borne fruit. What was so special about the Norwegian system that enabled it to dominate the well-funded Germans and French entries?

Norway has an abundance of those kinds of natural topographic challenges. A central concept in understanding how the system works is bandwidth. Bandwidth can be compared with the speed at which people talk.

In this analogy, the faster you talk, the higher the bandwidth. But high bandwidth can be a problem in places with lots of reflected signals.

The same problem explains why most hymns are sung slowly in church. If they are sung quickly, the acoustics of the church turn the hymn into an unintelligible mess. This phenomenon also confounds radio signals. But Mr. Maseng and Mr. Trandem came up with a clever solution. But if the bandwidth is too low, there is a greater chance that the signal will disappear because the receiving equipment cannot distinguish between different echoes. Maseng and Trandem altered their bandwidth during testing; they could do this because they devised a way to see their results in real time.

By doing this they were able to find the optimal bandwidth between the two extremes. Their competitors could not. This gave a variety of advantages. Greater levels of spectral efficiency could be gained, and in addition to this the use of digital circuitry would allow for higher levels of integration in the circuitry. This in turn would result in cheaper handsets with more features.

Nevertheless significant hurdles still needed to be overcome. For example, many of the methods for encoding the speech within a sufficiently narrow bandwidth needed to be developed, and this posed a significant risk to the project. Nevertheless the GSM system had been started. Work continued and a launch date for the new GSM system of was set for an initial launch of a service using the new cellular technology with limited coverage and capability to be followed by a complete roll out of the service in major European cities by and linking of the areas by Meanwhile technical development was taking place.

Initial trials had shown that time division multiple access techniques offered the best performance with the technology that would be available. This approach had the support of the major manufacturing companies which would ensure that with them on board sufficient equipment both in terms of handsets, base stations and the network infrastructure for GSM would be available.

Under the auspices of ETSI the specification took place. It provided functional and interface descriptions for each of the functional entities defined in the system. The aim was to provide sufficient guidance for manufacturers that equipment from different manufacturers would be interoperable, while not stopping innovation.

The result of the specification work was a set of documents extending to more than pages. Nevertheless the resultant phone system provided a robust, feature-rich system.

Thus the vision of a pan-European network was fast becoming a reality. However this took place before any networks went live. The aim to launch GSM by proved to be a target that was too tough to meet. Terminals started to become available in mid and the real launch took place in the latter part of that year.

With such a new service many were sceptical as the analogue systems were still in widespread use. Nevertheless by the end of GSM had attracted over a million subscribers and there were 25 roaming agreements in place. But the future destiny of GSM was not to stay rooted in the business market. Something happened that took it off this path and onto one that was to lead GSM to become the most successful communications network in history — with over 6 billion users.

The mobile industry was to move out of its base of professional electronics and into a new world of consumer electronics.

The point of origin of mobiles becoming a mass consumer item. Industry embraced the vision. The mobile revolution was born. One of the reasons why GSM was so attractive to developing countries was that it was a complete telecommunications network. Standards bodies in other parts of the world only produced a specification for the radio piece of the mobile network. Automatic roaming and handover of calls between base stations required dedicated exchanges for numbering and switching management.

GSM took the ideas developed for the NMT network and significantly extended them to support handover between exchanges and information security. A step forward was made in flexibility by using Signalling System No. Jan Audestad who led the network side of the GSM standard. The other miracle of GSM was that the technical standard was ever completed on time. Feeding into this was probably times that amount of paper by way of contributions to meetings.

The contributors were dispersed right across Europe.