An eyewitness to the mobile revolution

Inside the Mobile Revolution

The mobile phone revolution was anything but inevitable. Behind GSM were rival technologies, political disagreements, bold decisions and moments when the entire project might have unravelled. Stephen Temple was there, helping to shape the decisions that ultimately connected billions of people. This remarkable first-hand account takes you inside the meetings, confrontations and breakthroughs that changed the world—and reveals how close things came to turning out differently.

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The story in 25 chapters

What is inside

Chapter 1. AN UNPROMISING START
A journey across Europe could require a car full of incompatible telephone equipment. Earlier attempts at cooperation had failed. Could a patient Swedish chairman persuade countries with very different interests to try again?
Chapter 2. UK SEEDS OF THE NEW BEGINNING
Stephen Temple arrived at his new job to find almost no staff and no GSM policy file. Before Britain could help shape a European system, it needed to decide what it wanted from one.
Chapter 3. GETTING THE UK's INDUSTRIAL ACT TOGETHER
A visit to a secret laboratory revealed how far Britain still had to go. Rival companies had small teams and limited funds. A shared experimental system offered a way to give them a voice in Europe.
Chapter 4. THE TRIPARTITE AGREEMENT ON DIGITAL CELLULAR RADIO
A row over telephone exchanges created an unexpected opening for mobile cooperation. France and Germany were moving closer together, Italy joined them, and Britain faced the uncomfortable prospect of remaining outside.
Chapter 5. BERLIN GSM - BLOOD ON THE FLOOR
Temple announced a British candidate for a crucial post before he had found anyone willing to take it. In Berlin, even agreeing what the future mobile system should achieve became a struggle.
Chapter 6. THE QUADRIPARTITE AGREEMENT
A carefully qualified ministerial brief turned into an enthusiastic political promise. Britain appeared to be joining its European partners, but turning that promise into a signed agreement proved a different matter.
Chapter 7. GETTING OUR MAN INTO THE SEAT
Two confidential telephone calls brought an unexpected advantage. Each caller wanted discretion, and both wanted the same man in the job. Appointing the right leader still required winning the confidence of Europe’s operators.
Chapter 8. GSM FREQUENCY CHANNELS AND THE DELUGE
Mobile phones were selling too well. Britain’s existing networks wanted the frequencies reserved for GSM, putting tomorrow’s system under pressure from today’s customers. Finding room elsewhere would reach into military spectrum.
Chapter 9. MRS THATCHER & THE EU COUNCIL GET INVOLVED
Margaret Thatcher would support the proposal, provided there was no discussion. Three lines buried deep in a European communiqué helped give GSM political weight that technical meetings alone could not provide.
Chapter 10. THE TECHNOLOGY CHOICES – THE EASY BIT
Major manufacturers had spent heavily on their competing designs. Then a small team from Trondheim produced a result that upset expectations. The technology contest did not follow the hierarchy of industrial prestige.
Chapter 11. VODAFONE'S SECOND ASSAULT ON THE GSM CHANNELS
With snow disrupting the trains, Temple set off in Wellington boots for a ministerial lunch. Vodafone was making another urgent case for GSM’s frequencies, just as Europe approached a critical decision on its future system.
Chapter 12. The ROAD TO MADEIRA
An inch-thick technical report was reduced to a single comparison table. That apparent simplification became intensely controversial. How could delegates choose one system when agreement on the evidence was itself so difficult?
Chapter 13. A WEEK IN MADEIRA CAN BE A LONG TIME
Madeira promised sunshine, and Temple had brought his wife. The meeting instead ran into the small hours, with exhausted delegates still searching for agreement. Even a thirteen-to-two result was not the victory it appeared.
Chapter 14. IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS
A public quarrel between Britain’s operators threatened to undermine the European project. Meanwhile, an error in a draft legal text left room for an unexpected compromise over the very frequencies they were fighting about.
Chapter 15. MANOEUVRING BEHIND THE SCENES
A crucial report was due to arrive by fax before a Monday showdown. Ministers, engineers and industrial interests were now moving at once. Temple recalls how the struggle continued far beyond the conference room.
Chapter 16. PATTIE DEFUSES THE UK GSM FREQUENCY CHANNEL ROW
A late-night hotel discussion changed the arithmetic of the spectrum dispute. A deal that had seemed inadequate began to look valuable, while the minister still had to find terms both British operators could accept.
Chapter 17. THE TURNING POINT - BONN MEETING OF MINISTERS
Temple moved to a hotel so two rival operators could join the minister at the ambassador’s residence. In Bonn, ministers were about to turn a technical choice into a demand for a shared European service.
Chapter 18. THE GSM MOU - GSM GETS A TURBO BOOST
Four hours before Temple was due to leave for Copenhagen, Lord Young stopped the journey. The agreement was ready, but British participation suddenly was not. Clearance came with just half an hour to spare.
Chapter 19. FROM GSM TO PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS
The frequencies were available years before the equipment was expected. Temple proposed building around the pocket phone rather than the car telephone. One colleague’s response was to ask whether he had gone insane.
Chapter 20. FROM CONSULTATION TO COMPETITION
A new network had poor coverage and needed a reason for customers to try it. Free calls became the answer. Behind that offer lay a much larger gamble on competition and the future of the personal phone.
Chapter 21. GSM'S EXPANDING UNIVERSE
An unexpected call revealed that a GSM export to Australia had been blocked. Later, a proposal for separate roaming subscriptions threatened to put commercial borders back into a system designed to cross them.
Chapter 22. UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
A buzzing hearing aid exposed a problem that years of laboratory work had missed. Networks had already been ordered. Temple recalls the alarming discovery and the search for an answer that would not derail GSM.
Chapter 23. GSM and the 7 mobile radio revolutions
Why did GSM become so much bigger than a new radio technology? Temple pulls apart seven intertwined revolutions, from competition and roaming to the disappearance of the car phone and the rise of everyday texting.
Chapter 24. Could Europe create another GSM success?
Could Europe repeat its success, or had it abandoned the conditions that made GSM possible? Writing in the aftermath of the financial crisis, Temple asks who should take responsibility for the networks of the future.
Chapter 25. A Footnote in History
The pioneers moved on, while thousands of others turned GSM into an everyday reality. A Brussels pub became an improvised coordination centre—one that working GSM phones might have made unnecessary.

Foreword

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. This is the UK record 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 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 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 and 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. I could see so much that had gone wrong and particularly in respect of the role of European governments and regulators? Could I shine a light on this? The plan was to set out my GSM personal account to show how things had worked successfully in the 80's and compare and contrast with the situation 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 almost nothing 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.

Armin Silberhorne, a former senior German Official I had worked very closely with, best summed up the different viewpoints with his comment that a “political” account will always be seen differently through different eyes. This was very insightful. Officials at the time from France and Germany would view GSM through the eyes of those working in a state monopoly, with a Minister fully in charge – an ordered world in which engineers sought the best technical outcome…with the power to make it happen. Deregulation was still around the corner for them. The UK had already unleashed competition. In a competitive market nobody is in charge. I could see all the market and industrial forces tearing the GSM initiative apart … for the UK…GSM was a huge political challenge. 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.

Those who may only want to read this account of how GSM happened with an eye to seeing if Europe could create another GSM success should fast forward to Chapter 24. Certainly the Global Banking Crisis has shattered the belief that everything is best left to pure market forces and there is much to be re-discovered in this book about the lost art of EU inter-governmental intervention in mobile communications infrastructures that Europe used so successfully to launch GSM in 1991.

Stephen Temple CBE

20^th January 2010

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