It is 30 years since the first generation of mobile telephony, NMT, Nordic Mobile Telephony, was launched. NMT laid the foundation for the modern mobile communication and the technology marked an important step in the ongoing journey to make the world more mobile.
On October 1, 1981 NMT was launched at Televerket’s switch in Hammarby, a suburb of Stockholm, where the first MTX from Ericsson was installed. In more than 25 years NMT was in operation before it closed down the last day of 2007.
Televerket, which later became TeliaSonera, was already in the middle of the 1960s an especially strong advocate of the technology and the open standard.
“The evolution since then has been dramatic. Today, mobile communication is so much more for so many more people. It is an essential part of our daily life, all over the world, says Johan Wibergh, head of Ericsson’s Business Unit Networks.
“Our vision of a Networked Society is where people, business and society benefit from using more than 50 billion connected devices. Back in 1981, this was unthinkable. Now it’s close to happening and it’s incredibly exciting.”
"The Nordic NMT-system was groundbreaking, as it provided people in the Nordic countries a totally new possibility of mobile communication, says Håkan Dahlström, President of Mobility Services, TeliaSonera.
"The standard we built it on paved the way for GSM and modern mobile communication technology, which now serves a community of more than 5 billion users worldwide. It is a remarkable achievement that no one could ever dream of. And customer demand for communication continues to explode," concluded Håkan Dahlström.