Dr Martin Cooper placed the first “proper” mobile phone call<\/a> on 3 April 1973 but the first proper mobile network was NTT’s to claim (and someone needs to update Wikipedia as to that. Tomi?).<\/p>\nAll of it of course went even further back than that. See:<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Image credit:<\/em> http:\/\/openlearn.open.ac.uk\/file.php\/3317\/T307_1_010i.jpg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was today, 30 years ago, that NTT (now NTT DoCoMo) launched the world’s first commercial mobile cellular telecoms network in Tokyo with 88 base stations and, boy, did we come a long way since. Take fees for a start: there was a $2,000 sign-up fee and then a monthly fee of $300. On top […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[756],"tags":[107,277,900,434,899,479,901],"class_list":["post-731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-756","tag-carriers","tag-handsets","tag-mobile-networks","tag-motorola","tag-ntt","tag-ntt-docomo","tag-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paSwZv-bN","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":732,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions\/732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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It was today, 30 years ago, that NTT (now NTT DoCoMo) launched the world’s first commercial mobile cellular telecoms network in Tokyo with 88 base stations and, boy, did we come a long way since. Take fees for a start: there was a $2,000 sign-up fee and then a monthly fee of $300. On top of that, you would be charged $1 per minute voice. A handset weighed in at a cool 10kg (more than some budget airlines allow you as hand luggage these days; but then you would probably only fly First if you had one of those…). Nokia was still into wellies at the time, I think… \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n