The 1G Eighties (the PTT and Bell System Era)
Dan,
<< Did any, all, some of the Euros mandate a wireless analog standard then? >>
All? No. Any and some? Yes. Rather a mixed bag, and remember that 27 independent countries are members of today's European Union, and each (had) has their own telecom regulatory agency or agencies for wireline and wireless, even though CEPT (the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations) was established to coordinate the activities of the European state telecommunications and postal organizations in 1958.
The major difference between Europe and the US at the dawn of the 1G cellular era at the beginning of the eighties (and even towards the end of that decade although privatization was in full swing) was that telecommunications companies in Europe and almost all countries worldwide except Japan, the U.S., and Canada were essentially government owned public utilities -- PTT's (Postal, Telegraph, and Telephone companies).
The U.S., Canada, and Japan had privately owned communications monopolies and oligopolies (AT&T, the Bell System and Western Electric, and NTT DoCoMo). Europe and ROW had primarily government owned monopolies and (in some cases) oligopolies.
The French, German, and Italian's each had its own proprietary 1G cellular standards and a confined set of suppliers primarily from their own country. The Nordic countries (and several other countries worldwide) used primarily an open standard (NMT) with a broad set of suppliers. After privatization in mid-decade the UK primarily used TACS, an AMPS derivative with a broad set of suppliers.
CEPT set aside uniform European spectrum in 900 MHz in 1979 and in 1984 created Groupe Speciale Mobile comprised of regulators from all European countries to define requirements for a single interoperable Pan-European open standard with the broadest possible supplier base and in 1987 created ETSI to standardize GSM and invited vendors to join that initiative.
That's a relatively short answer to a question whose answer can be complex. I hope you find it reasonably responsive. Dan Steinbock gave it a rather thorough treatment and spent several hundred pages painting the global landscape as it existed back then, on through the age of privatization, and into the digital era in his book "Wireless Horizon: Strategy and Competition in the Worldwide Mobile Marketplace" ...
tinyurl.com
Best,
- Eric - |
