25 years of cell phone

In the early hours of New Year’s Day 1985, Michael Harrison phoned his father Sir Ernest to wish him a happy new year. There may appear nothing remarkable in such a private show of filial affection, but Sir Ernest was chairman of Racal Electronics and his son was making the first-ever mobile phone call in the UK, using the network built by its newest investment, a company based round the corner from a curry house in Newbury, Berkshire.
Later that morning, comedian Ernie Wise made a very public mobile phone call from St Katherine’s Dock, east London, to announce that the very same network, Vodafone, was now open for business. A few days later, its sole rival, Cellnet, a joint venture between BT and Securicor, was also up and running.At the time, mobile phones were barely portable, weighing in at almost a kilogram, costing several thousand pounds and, in some cases, with little more than 20 minutes talktime. The networks themselves were small; Vodafone had just a dozen masts covering London and the M4 corridor while Cellnet launched with a single mast, stuck on the BT Tower. Neither company had any inkling of the huge potential of wireless communications and the dramatic impact that mobile phones would have on society over the next quarter century.
“We projected there would only be about a million ever sold and we would get about 35% of the market and BT projected there would be about half a million and they would get about 80% of the market,” remembers Sir Christopher Gent, former Vodafone chief executive who was at St Katherine’s Dock a quarter of a decade ago as he prepared to take up his post of managing director the following day. “In the first year, we sold about 15,000 to 20,000 phones. The hand portable Motorola was about £3,000 but most of the phones we sold were carphones from the likes of Panasonic and Nokia.”
Having seen mobile phone penetration soar above 100% in 2004, the industry has spent the later part of the past decade trying to persuade people to do more with their phones than just call and text, culminating in the fight between the iPhone and a succession of touchscreen rivals – soon to include Google’s Nexus One.
John Cunliffe, chief technology officer at Ericsson in north west Europe, believes the next wave of growth for mobile telephony will come not from persuading more people to get a phone – because many already have one – but connecting machines to wireless networks. Everything from vehicle fleets and smart electric and water meters to people’s fridge freezers will one day be able to communicate.
“What we have at the moment is 4.5 billion devices worldwide, what we at Ericsson see is that going to 50 billion devices by 2020,” he reckons. “This is all about machine to machine communication, touching all aspects of our lives.”