Constant Touch

by Jon Agar

  Swedish industrialisation was also marked by its stance towards natural resources, in particular the swathes of forest in the north. This Norrland provided the raw materials for the pulp, match and paper industries, but it was not ransacked. Instead Swedes regarded it as a national resource, and one to be used efficiently in a planned, rational manner. Indeed Sweden had, until very recently, a highly dispersed and sparse population, encouraging identification with the countryside. An environmental tinge entered into the collection of ideas and attitudes that Swedes regard as their contribution to the world. Fed by a nostalgia for great power status, by a 20th-century foreign policy of military neutrality, and by pride in the harmony created by ‘third way’ social democratic politics, Swedes have been keen that the world should learn from their example. Since the Second World War, Swedes have, for example, been highly active in the United Nations. We will see that this peculiar internationalism shaped technology too.

  Swedes tend to bristle indignantly at the suggestion that they are very similar to Norwegians or Danes. Of course no two individuals are alike. But Scandinavian countries share more cultural and political similarities than differences, however jealously cultivated the latter can be. A shared history helps explain this: the three formed the 15th-century Kalmar Union, which, with different twists of fate, could have been the foundation of a United Kingdom of Scandinavia. In the 19th century, under Oscar I of Sweden, an explicit project of ‘Scandinavianism’ was pursued, until 1864 when its poverty was revealed as Sweden failed to come to Denmark’s aid against a Prussian invasion. Still, many of the characteristics I have ascribed to Sweden can also be applied to Denmark, Norway and to some extent Finland, including social democracy, internationalism and an enthusiasm for technology.

  In 1967 the chief engineer at Swedish Telecom Radio, Carl-Gösta Åsdal, suggested that an automated nationwide mobile telephone and paging network should be built, integrated with the landline network. Further studies, supervised at Swedish Telecom’s radio laboratories by Ragnar Berglund and Östen Mäkitalo, tested the feasibility of Åsdal’s idea. For such an ambitious project, collaborators were needed. In 1969, the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) Group was established, with engineers representing Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, and with a view to developing a cellular phone system. These engineers worked for the state-owned telecommunications businesses, and they therefore carried with them the shared values of Nordic government, in particular a faith in development by consensus and rational discussion between experts. (These common values would not have been found if, say, the gathering had been between English, French, German and Spanish electrical engineers.) The NMT standard, defining how parts of the cellular system would interact, was also crucially affected by the Scandinavian relationship between expert and state: while the expert was integrated into government, and therefore retained influence, a close touch with everyday society was preserved. In the spirit of good industrial design and of technology as an equalising force, customer surveys ensured that the NMT standard matched people’s wants and desires. (But notice how different the Scandinavian engineers’ attitude was to the General Post Office’s, say. No insistence on one squat black telephone here!)

  The political heritage can also be found in Scandinavian management of the radio spectrum. Like a virtual Norrland, the spectrum was seen as a national resource, the use of which should not be restricted but be planned for efficiency and the greater good. Already in 1955, for example, the Swedish state-owned telecoms company, Televerket, had launched the first mobile telephone system in Europe, less than a decade after AT&T’s equivalent. With a small population spread over a big, forested country, mobile radio found many customers. With high demand and official encouragement, there were already 20,000 mobile phone users in Sweden by 1981, proportionately far higher than elsewhere in Europe, when the NMT cellular system was launched. With such a prepared and fertile ground, it is not surprising NMT was a success. By 1986 capacity was full, and a second, higher-frequency system (called NMT 900 to distinguish it from the lower-frequency NMT 450) was introduced.

  NMT had demonstrated that it was possible for electrical engineers from different countries to sit down together and write a standard for a trans-national cellular phone system. It was possible to ‘roam’, to use the same phone passing from Oslo to Helsinki, because the technical details determining how a mobile terminal would communicate with base stations, or how base stations would link to the switching centre, had been hammered out beforehand. (Compare this ease of roaming with the situation across the Atlantic, where the common standard, AMPS, was much looser, and where operations depended to a greater extent on decisions made by each company. It was impossible to roam freely across the privately-owned crazy-paving of American cellular.) Furthermore, once the NMT standard was defined, the telecoms industry, already closely involved in developments, could freely offer products. Mobile phones for the pioneering Nordic cellular system were provided both by home companies (the Danish Dancall and Storno, Swedish Ericsson, Finnish Mobira – part of Nokia), but also by American and Japanese. The prosperous Scandinavians could afford the price – the equivalent of the small car that was still needed to carry an early mobile phone. However, the contract for the central switching technology, the heart of any cellular system and therefore a strategically important economic decision, went straight to Ericsson.

  Chapter 6

  Europe before GSM: La Donna è Mobile, Männer sind nicht!

  By 1987, five years after the launch of the Nordic mobile cellular phones, roughly 2 per cent of the population were subscribers. Cellphones had become a standard tool for truckers, construction workers and maintenance engineers, although a few were being sold for private use, especially for installation in the weekend holiday homes and boats that are a feature of Scandinavian life. This early start would continue into the 21st century.

  The public telecoms monopolies in other European countries slowly began to respond to the Nordic experiment and to glimmers of public demand. Several – Spain, Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium – ordered NMT services. Often these services stalled because the exact NMT frequencies were already in use, which meant that new expensive mobile terminals had to be produced. In Spain, for example, Telefónica had ordered the NMT system from Ericsson even before it had been launched in Sweden, but the pricey terminals attracted few customers.

  But the chauvinistic telecom monopolies of the ‘big’ European countries – Germany, France, Italy and Britain – decided to design their own mobile cellular systems. Each was designed to respond to peculiar national demands. In France, the Direction Générale Télécommunications began an ambitious grand projet­, Radiocom 2000, which was more like a souped-up national dispatch radio system than a cellphone. It was as distinctly Gallic as Minitel, the network of public information terminals that would later act as a barricade against the internet-pronged attack of American mass culture. Contracts for Radiocom 2000 were awarded to another immense state-controlled French combine, the military and aerospace firm Matra. Like many French national projects, when Radiocom 2000 was launched in 1985 it was available only in Paris. Again prices were high and uptake low. However, it is easy to be unfair in retrospect. Mobile analyst Garry Garrard records the telling observation of France Telecom’s Philippe Dupuis in 1988: ‘If it had not been demonstrated in other countries that mobile communications can become more abundant and cheaper, everyone would be happy.’

  Likewise, in Germany, the country in Europe in which wealth and technical proficiency were highest, a new cellular standard was developed by the telecoms monopoly, Deutsche Bundespost, and the dominant electronics manufacturer, Siemens. Netz-C was launched – comprehensively, to 98 per cent of the West German population – as a commercial service in May 1986. A unique feature of early German mobile cellular phones was a personal identification card, the ancestor of the later SIM card. This bonus helped bump the price up, so again, compared to cell-happy
Scandinavia, sales were disappointing. Politics shaped the German mobile system in another unique way. In 1990, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunification of Germany, the appalling state of East German telecommunications had to be confronted if the wider tasks of transforming the economy and rebuilding government were to proceed. The situation needed a demonstration of the power of capitalism. Instead of slowly installing telephone cables, the mobile Netz-C was quickly expanded to cover the East German Länder.

  But Netz-C was a poor system. Compared to Italy’s, and especially the pioneering Nordic cellphones, German mobile was a failure. We will see soon how an unsatisfied German market would be crucial to launching a new, world-beating mobile system. However, if we had paused in 1991 and surveyed mobile Europe, we would have discovered a pattern that would have confirmed the prejudices of any Eurosceptic. The picture was of a hotchpotch of national systems, each designed to satisfy national interests (often, indeed, the interests of the public telecoms monopolies rather than French, German, Swiss or Spanish customers), and employing ten incompatible standards. Oddly, the spectacle was most pitiable in the most wealthy, technophilic countries, France and Germany. The United Kingdom, insular in its own way, was pursuing a detached Thatcherite experiment. We will see soon what happened there. But first, a bureaucratic miracle.

  Chapter 7

  GSM: European union

  In a chilly Stockholm, in December 1982, engineers and administrators from eleven European countries gathered to inaugurate GSM – at first an acronym that merely described themselves, the Groupe Spécial Mobile, but later, as the Global System for Mobile, something that would record an unlikely feat of world conquest. The lead had come not from the big European powers, but from the Nordic countries, which had in NMT a successful trans-national mobile system ready for expansion, and from the Netherlands, which did not. The delegates were there to consider whether a Europe-wide digital cellular phone system was technically, and more importantly politically, possible. Older standards such as NMT had been analogue; good for the transmission of voice, but little else. Going digital created the opportunity to provide new services such as data transmission, but also, more importantly, the chance to make a pan-European political statement. But, despite the example of NMT, surely the odds of overcoming entrenched national telecoms interests were slim?

  In February 1987, in the warmer climate of Madeira, the group gathered again to hear the results of prototype tests. Not only had these tests been passed with flying colours, but the political will had been found to iron out national differences and to choose one, pan-European standard. What had happened?

  The ‘Europe’ built on the ruins of the Second World War was the outcome of two opposing tendencies. For every Jean Monnet or Robert Schumann who dreamed of a United States of Europe, there was a General de Gaulle or Margaret Thatcher who was deeply suspicious. It is noticeable, however, that while the sceptics of Europe bolstered their arguments by appeal to grand, even sentimental ideas – of national spirit or self-determination – the federalists’ project of building Europe has often progressed by mundane and technocratic appeal to better technological, material organisation. So, for example, following the Monnet-authored Schumann Plan of May 1950, the European project was launched with the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community by the Treaty of Paris in 1951. In six countries (France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands), the industries that produced the material structure of Europe – the Europe of reinforced concrete, car chassis, dynamos and steel knives – came under the power of a supra-national Higher Authority. In 1957, with the two Treaties of Rome, one community became three, with the addition of a European Economic Community and, in the nuclear field, Euratom – another example of the technological spirit behind European organisation. In 1986, by which time the original six had been joined by the United Kingdom, Denmark, Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain, the Single European Act expanded on the earlier target of mere coordination of the EEC, becoming the much more robust aim of making Europe a single market, bigger than any other in the world. The project to build one European cellular phone system, based on the GSM standard, would be a major material means of realising the dream. As the institutions of Europe grew more powerful, so they increasingly became the source of further pushes towards European integration. Of these, the European Commission, created from the smaller staff and management of the three existing communities and headed by a President, was the most important.

  Evidence for GSM as part of a dream of ‘Europe’ can be found by wading a little way into European bureaucracy. In particular a Recommendation issued by the Council of the European Communities on 25 June 1987, called 87/371/EEC, addressed the question of mobile communications directly. The Council is a collection of politicians, but the paperwork it considers is largely generated by the Commission. So 87/371/EEC should be seen as an expression of the interests of the European Commission. The document is written in legalese, but the reasons for favouring a pan-European mobile system shine through. Broadly, they were two-fold.

  First, the dream of a single European market would remain just that if a means was not found of reducing national differences and improving communication. When the authors of the document wrote that ‘the land-based mobile communications systems currently in use in the Community are largely incompatible and do not allow users on the move in vehicles, boats, trains or on foot throughout the Community, including inland or coastal waters, to reap the benefits of European-wide services and European-wide markets’, they were addressing both problems. GSM offered an exceptional moment for reducing difference: the ‘change-over to the second generation cellular digital mobile communications system’ provided ‘a unique opportunity to establish truly pan-European mobile communications’. ‘European users on the move’, communicating ‘efficiently and economically’, would be the basis for a single market. Again, ‘Europe’, an otherwise rather ghostly entity, would be given substance by building material technological systems.

  Second, the eurocrats kept a watchful eye on the main economic competitors: Japan and the United States. GSM would not only be an instrument of European unification, but also provide a lead in the cut-throat but strategically important global marketplace for technological goods. 87/371/EEC states explicitly that ‘a coordinated policy for the introduction of a pan-European cellular digital mobile radio service will make possible the establishment of a European market in mobile and portable terminals which will be capable of creating, by virtue of its size, the necessary development conditions to enable undertakings established in Community countries to maintain and improve their presence on world markets’.

  So the European Commission, the civil service of the European project, had seen in GSM a political tool of immense value: telecommunications – and particularly GSM – would provide the infrastructure of Europe ready to mount a convincing economic challenge to the United States and Japan, and a pan-European telecoms network would encourage organisations to think European. The one drawback was that the European Commission had not been responsible for encouraging GSM from the outset. Instead, the representative of the old, increasingly unfashionable public telecommunications monopolies, the Confer­ence of European Posts and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT), had been. Nevertheless, with bureaucratic sang froid, the Commission claimed credit anyway.

  The best illustration of GSM as a politically-charged European project is given by the facility to roam. Just as in NMT, roaming – the ability to use the same terminal under different networks – was prioritised, even though it was expensive, because it demonstrated political unity. The complexity of the technical specifications that allowed a mobile user to drive from Lisbon to Leiden gave GSM a new, unwelcome nickname – the ‘Great Software Monster’. Commentators called GSM the ‘most complicated system built by man since the Tower of Babel’. But the political intention was in stark opposition: in place of
the conflicting chaos of incomprehensible tongues, GSM would stand for unity. In practice, very few users had roamed across Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland with the NMT system. Most users had stayed within a few miles of Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen or Helsinki. Again, with GSM, for many years roaming was an expensive political luxury – the telecommunications equivalent of the agricultural subsidies that were grudgingly paid to keep European peace. Ironically, when roaming did take off in the very late 1990s, it was enthusiastically embraced by partying twentysomethings in Ibiza as much as by European business executives. The reason can be found in a capacity that had been buried in the GSM specifications as little more than an afterthought: the Short Message Service. The phenomenon of text messaging will be examined later.