Mobile technology received a
huge boost once the Confederation of European Posts and
Telecommunications, CEPT for short, designated a task group, the Groupe
Speciale Mobile, to create a standardized mobile communication
technology. The first countries to actively sign on to the GSM project
were Germany and France. One year later, the European Commission
endorsed this project and shortly thereafter, in 1986, the Heads of
State of the European Union, which at that time
was not yet formally created, endorsed it as well. Two more countries,
Italy and the UK signed on to the project. One year later the basic
parameters defining the GSM standard were presented. The way to a
unified European mobile telephony standard was set.
Although initially the 900MHz bandwidth was designated to carry the
mobile signal, by 1989 this regulation was changed to the 1800 MHz. The
same year the internationally accepted digital cellular telephony
standard was declared as defined and accepted by partner states. The
very first GSM network ever to be successfully deployed and operated
was in Finland, in 1991. Roaming and the first SMS came a year later.
Another year passed and the first country outside of Europe to sign on
to GSM standard was a whole continent, Australia. The boom continues
and by 1995 the United States deployed their GSM version at 1900
MHz.
Right at the beginning of the creation of GSM, there was a separate
group of people designated by the coordinating body to develop a short
message service. The idea was to provide something which will make
pagers obsolete and not usurp the bandwidth. The team that was
designated to work on SMS creation consisted of several people, most
notably are Friedhelm Hillebrand of the German Postage Service -
Bundespost, Bernard Ghillebaert of the PTT (predecessor of the France
Tlcom), Finn Trosby of the Norwegian Telenor, Kevin Holly of the
Cellnet and Ian Harris of Vodafone.
The solution was to have the texting piggyback on the control signal
between the cellular tower and the cellular phones on the continuously
active control channel. This channel is needed to keep the
communication alive and established and there was no reason why such
control calls to the tower should not carry messages as well. It worked
very well and currently around two and a half billion people all over
the world are using SMS to send messages. SMS is a commercially very
lucrative business, in also provides the companies and carriers with
almost hundred billion United States dollars on revenue. Although
invented sometimes in 1984/1985, it took almost fifteen years for the
service to start gaining massive popularity.
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