About

There is a short term and a long term vision behind this Web site. The short term vision is to provide a vehicle to publish a book about the political history of GSM. Political has both a big “P” to deal with institutions like the EU and a small “p” to capture the interaction of the people intimately involved in making GSM happen. The longer term vision is to provide a place where anyone involved in significant mobile radio developments could publish insider accounts of events they helped to shape. That long term ambition has yet to be realized…the contacts form is an open door.

Over the period 1984-87 the political and strategic direction of GSM was being shaped by France, Germany, Italy and the UK. It was the genesis of the mobile revolution. “Inside the Mobile Revolution” is the UK record of what happened, how it happened, why it happened and captures the political dynamics within which it all took place.

The GSM 1800 MHz (PCN) element was added a few years later when the UK’s DTI was at the leading edge of telecommunications liberalisation and I propelled it to be the first credible entity to set out the vision of the personal mobile phone as a consumer product (“Phones on the Move”) and put forward the conditions to make it happen.

My election as Chairman of the Technical Assembly of the European Telecommunications standards Institute in 1988 then provided an excellent vantage point as GSM went through its transition from a policy to a new born infant digital mobile industry.

All this left me sitting on a unique (although in parts partial) account of how GSM came to be the mobile radio equivalent of the cosmic “big bang” and one of Europe’s most successful high technology projects.

The GSM element of this account was written within 12 months of the signing of the GSM MoU in Copenhagen in 1987. I had no motive to spin the story in any particular direction or make any particular claims for the success of GSM, which was still a few years away from even getting off the ground. It was simply a means of unwinding on holiday in the French Alps from a tumultuous 18 months by recording to paper what I had just seen and been through. It went straight into a drawer.

Shortly after the launch of GSM (in 1991) would have been an ideal time to publish the story. A close friend and former DTI colleague Jonathan Phillips (now Sir Jonathan Phillips) stayed up one night and read the manuscript. His red ink over the draft said it all. There was no way it would have got official approval for publication without ripping out the very heart of the story “ the political dynamics”. The story was to remain hidden behind the Official Secrets Act for the next 17 years gathering dust.

The manuscript was next visited in 2008. Europe’s leadership in mobile radio had largely been ceded to other parts of the world. So much had gone wrong and some of this had been driven by the changing role of European governments and regulators. I decided to try to publish my GSM personal account to show how things had worked successfully in the 80′s as part of an analysis of how things were working (or not working) in 2008. This was pre-empted when Lord Carter invited me to sit on the Digital Britain Steering Group in 2008. Rather than drafting my analysis I finished up drafting the infrastructure section for Lord Carter for his Digital Britain report.

It was fun and it simplified what to do with my GSM account. It just needed to be a public record of an important event in Europe’s industrial, social and political history. No longer would everyone know how the PC and World Wide Web revolutions had come about (with over 1.3 and 2.5 billion users respectively in 2010) but know very little about how the even more successful mobile revolution had happened (with over 4 billion users in 2010). Finally the curtain would be pulled back on how GSM created a mobile revolution.

Prior to publication I shared a draft version with former colleagues who had worked closely with me on the GSM project at the time. Some colleagues took exception to parts of the account relating to the period 1984-87. I was asked to change some things and delete others. A lively exchange of e-mails followed. It was quite a problem for me as GSM was a joint effort and I was only one of a number of key players…although perhaps one of the few at a senior level to have been in the inside of both the political and technical centers of events. On the other hand a consensus history only written with the benefit of hindsight tends to be somewhat air-brushed. My record was actually made at the time and in fact as far as I am aware the only record made at the time.

The book has its critics who state that this is only the GSM history from the viewpoint of one country.  It is a fair criticism. That said it was actually a very interesting historic place to view the GSM development. The UK had already unleashed competition. In a competitive market nobody is in charge. It was only possible (at the time) to have seen from the UK all the market and industrial forces tearing the GSM initiative apart…the only place where the necessity of the GSM Memorandum of Understanding could have been recognized and framed in a form to accommodate a competitive market. In this respect the UK brought a unique contribution to the GSM initiative since, by the time GSM was launched in 1991, mobile competition had become almost the norm across the European Union and indeed one of the engines of its success across Europe.

Another facet of this account is the UK’s relationship with the rest of Europe. Over many decades the UK has never really embraced the European Union with any great enthusiasm and positively disengages from time to time…yet here is an example of how Europe can become world class when the UK does engage positively and enthusiastically with France, Germany, Italy and the other major EU countries on a common project. It shows that being positive about Europe does not mean saying yes to everything…and in fact my account shows it can be a bit of a rough and tumble…but when the result comes through that channels the entire energy and creativity of Europe…the world changes for the better…and GSM is no finer example.

Stephen Temple CBE
20th January 2010