Constant Touch by Jon Agar

itself enough to explain GSM. The European digital standard benefited, bizarrely, from the chaos of what went before. Many different national systems at least produced a variety of technical possibilities from which to pick and choose. NMT provided a basic template onto which extra features – such as SIM cards, from Germany’s Netz-C – could be grafted. Furthermore, the relative failure of the first cellular phones in countries such as France, and especially Germany, created a pent-up demand that GSM could meet. In the United States, where customers were satisfied with the analogue standard, there was little demand for digital until spectrum space began to run out. Paradoxically, America lost the lead becauseits first generation of cellular phones was too successful.
    But more important still was how GSM satisfied both European customers and manufacturers. Recall that when I smashed up my old GSM phone I found that it consisted of many components. In the early 1990s technical trends, especially miniaturisation, led to a qualitative change in mobile terminal design. Suddenly, mobile phones became small and light enough to routinely carry around. (‘Handportables’ had existed before, but they were not cheap and certainly not easily manageable.) There was a leap from car phone to hand phone. Part and parcel of the same process, the new designs attracted new customers, and the mobile became less a business tool and much more an everyday object. The shift marks the start of the mobile as an object of mass culture and individual necessity. Three manufacturers soon dominated the mobile market. Spurred by competition between each other, Nokia of Finland, Ericsson of Sweden and the American Motorola designed and marketed ever smaller and cheaper phones.
    These companies, and European firms that supplied other parts of the GSM cellular networks, also benefited from the fortunate outcome of a patents battle. Aware that such a complex system as GSM might rely on patents that may only be discovered, ruinously, at a later date, European planners of GSM insisted in 1988that manufacturers indemnify themselves against the risk. Although the demand was later watered down, many manufacturers, including the mighty Far East conglomerates and most US firms, decided to sit GSM out. This obscure legal controversy had the effect of reducing competition and massively strengthening the firms amenable to agreement: Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola. (Motorola had European factories.) Select manufacturing interests were therefore happy with GSM. These factors were as important in pushing GSM forward as pan-European political motives had been for starting the ball rolling.
    Chapter 8
Digital America divided
    Onlywhen too many American analogue cellphone users were cramming into the available spectrum space did attention seriously turn to launching a digital standard that could compete with GSM. In the spirit of free market competition, a number of alternative approaches were proposed.
    Imagine you have 30 people at a great party, all on the same cellphone network and all calling their friends. If they all tried to use the same frequency at once, then no one would be able to talk. This was the problem confronted by the telecommunications engineers at the very end of the 1980s – except that the party could be the size of Chicago or New York. There are several solutions. Each party-goer could be allocated a tiny sliver of frequency of which they had sole use. This solution, called Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA), only works so far as you can slice up the scarce frequency bands thin enough without affecting operation. In practice, you soon run into problems. So another solution is to not broadcast all the conversation. For example, take a second of transmission. By devoting the first thirtieth of a second to the conversation from the first party-goer, the second thirtieth of a second to that of the second party-goer, and so on,