20 Years Since the First GSM Call

Today, the world celebrates two decades since the first GSM call in the world was made, on July 1st, 1991, in Finland.

The very first call on GSM was made on the airwaves of Radiolinja, which has become Elisa in the meantime, on a network infrastructure provided by TeleNokia and Siemens, which is known today as Nokia Siemens Network.

Harri Holkeri, Finland’s Prime Minister at that time, wrote history along with Kaarina Suonio, Mayor of the Finnish City of Tampere, as they had the first conversation in the world over the GSM network on the original 900MHz band.

You can have a look at the said call in the video embedded below, in Finnish, with subtitles.

GSM, or Global System for Mobile communications, was adopted back in 1987 as a standard for digital mobile technology in European countries. It was the second-generation mobile technology, capable of providing support for both data and voice traffic.

“GSM was the first digital technology based on open standards and one that made the widespread adoption of mobile phones possible,” said Pekka Soini, head of corporate development office at Nokia Siemens Networks.

“GSM continues to evolve and will be here in the coming decades together with 3G and LTE as an essential building block of the mobile broadband.”

Things have evolved significantly since 20 years ago, that's for sure, with over 4.4 billion mobile subscribers using the technology today in a number of 234 countries around the world. The standard serves about 80 percent of the mobile market on Earth.

The GSM technology offered high-quality voice calls, along with easy international roaming, and provided support for a range of new services, including text messaging (SMS), all of which helped it enjoy impressive growth in mobile usage.

Today, GSM registers around 1 million new subscribers each and every day, which translates in a growth of around 12 new additions each second.

Nokia provided the first GSM network in the world in 1989, and released the first digital handheld GSM phone in 1992, the Nokia 1011.

“When we were building up the system and creating the first Nokia GSM phone that would make that first call very few of us dared to dream about the future,” said Timo Ali-Vehmas, VP, compatibility & industry collaboration, Nokia.

“None of us back then imagined the huge impact GSM would go on to have for the lives of billions of people around the world. Of course, none of this could have been possible without the pioneering work by so many bright minds in the industry over the last twenty years. That work continues today and it is terrific to see GSM continuing to evolve and renew in many exciting ways.”



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