Yesterday, April 3, marked 50 years since the first mobile call was made. Engineer and inventor Marty Cooper rang in the mobile handset when he made the first call on a New York City street using a phone that weighed just under a kilogram and had a battery life of 25 minutes.
During a video interview at MWC23 earlier this year, Cooper joked the battery life of the handset didn’t matter at the time because it was too heavy to hold up for very long. For his pioneering work, Cooper, who is known as the Father of the Cell Phone, was honored at the world’s biggest mobile tech show as the first recipient of the GSMA’s GLOMO Lifetime Achievement Award.
Cooper and his team at Motorola developed the brick-shaped DynaTAC 8000X commercial mobile phone ten years after a prototype was used for that first call. At the time, it worked in just two US cities. Those phones sold for $4,000 when they first became available.
“By today’s value, it was well over $10,000 to have a cell phone,“ said Cooper during the MWC23 interview. “They were expensive and they didn’t work very well. One thing we absolutely knew is that someday everybody would have a phone.“
From that first mobile call, the mobile industry has grown to 5.4 billion unique mobile subscribers as of end-2022 and is on track to hit 6.3 billion by 2030. There are also more than 8.4 billion SIM connections globally.
Nokia and SURF, the organization for IT in Dutch education and research, have successfully reached a single carrier 800Gb/s optical transmission over SURF’s existing cross-border, multi-vendor research and education network infrastructure.
Nokia and Vodafone are collaborating to test the viability of L4S technology over passive optical networks (PON).
The GSMA believes that critical reform of European laws is necessary to position the region as a technology frontrunner by 2030.
