US celebrates 25 years of mobile phone calls

The US of A this week celebrated the 25th anniversary of the first commercial cellular call made in the country, a milestone which also cemented Motorola’s place in history.

According to US trade association the CTIA, the first commercial cellular call in the US was placed on October 13, 1983 to the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell in Germany from the president of Ameritech Mobile Communications at a ceremony held outside of Soldier Field in Chicago.

This transatlantic conversation launched the nation’s first citywide commercial cellular system, supported by the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, one of the world’s first ‘portable’ handsets, which weighed in at nearly two pounds, was 13 inches long, and boasted only 30 minutes of talk time.

To be fair to Moto, which as it will never let us forget, later invented the RAZR, the DynaTAC was more portable than the world’s first ‘mobile’ phone, which debuted on NMT-450 networks in Saudi Arabia, Sweden and Norway just a couple of years earlier.

Back then Nokia was only a rubber and cable manufacturer, when it released the Mobira Senator 450 through a partnership with Finnish television maker Salora. Perhaps ‘mobile’ was a touch misleading, though – the unit weighed in at nearly 10 kilos.

According to the CTIA, there are now more than 262 million wireless subscribers in the US, totaling around 83 per cent of the country’s population.

Industry analyst and telecoms.com parent Informa Telecoms & Media said that there will be 4 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide by the end of this year. And assuming that the world’s four billionth mobile subscription is activated during the fourth quarter, Informa says that it will have taken just five full quarters for the last billion net additions to be won.