- CEPT
- For the purpose of this story the Conference of European Posts and Telecommunications administrations that sat over the GSM standards group when it was a part of CEPT. In fact there was an intermediate management tier called CCH but GSM was essentially self-managing over its entire life.
- DTI
- UK department of state for trade and industry matters. The name changed several times under the Labour Government that tended to use the term “business” rather than “trade and industry”
- GSM
- Name of the standards group (picking up the French acronym of the Group Special Mobile or special mobile group). It also became the name of the 2nd generation digital cellular radio standard Europe adopted and deployed in 1991.
- EU
- European Union.
- ETSI
- European Telecommunications Standards Institute, Europe's officially recognised body for making telecommunications and mobile radio technical standards.
- Hz
- Characteristic of a radio wave that is used either to define where in the electro-magnetic spectrum a radio carrier sits or how wide it is. One hertz (one cycle per second) is too small to be useful in talking about radio systems and the terms kHz, MHz and GHz are most often come across. A kHz (pronounced kilo-hertz) is 1000 Hz. MHz (pronounced mega-hertz) is 1,000,000 Hz. GHz (pronounced giga-hertz) is 1,000,000,000 Hz.
- MOU
- Memorandum of Understanding, a handy format of international agreement that did not have all the political overtones of a Treaty and none of the huge legal detail that tends to accompany commercial agreements.
- Narrowband TDMA
- A system used for GSM where the radio channel was only 200 kHz wide
- PCN
- The term the DTI coined for GSM networks running at 1800 MHz that were intended for small hand mobile phones and stood for Personal Communications Networks
- PTT
- The government structure that existed in most European countries that ran the telephone services and was also a government department with a Minister. In some countries there was a separation between the government owned telephone company and the government department such as Italy.
- TACS
- The analogue cellular radio standard the UK adopted in 1982 for its first generation cellular radio networks. It stood for Total Access Communications Systems but was in fact the US AMPS standard running in a 25 kHz channel rather than the 30 kHz used in the US.
- TRAC
- Technical Recommendations Application Committee, an informal group that decided which voluntary CEPT technical recommendations for terminal equipment would be turned into legally enforced EU regulations.
- TDMA
- A technical way of arranging a number of telephone calls to be sent over the same radio channel where the data from each call was compressed sent as a burst and then expanded into a continuous data stream at the far end. Each burst was carefully timed to last for one time slot and the GSM radio channel had 8 such time slots.
Inside the Mobile RevolutionStephen Temple