Read Online Constant Touch by Jon Agar - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jon Agar
Tags: science, Internet, Telecommunications, engineering and technology, electronics and communications, telephone and wireless technology, mobile telephones
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Racalâs group decided to trade under the name âVodafoneâ.
A committee, the Joint Radiotelephone Interfaces Group, on which all the governmental and business parties were represented, decided which cellular standard to adopt. The Nordic NMT was rejected because it would not provide enough capacity for central London. Other possibilities were ruled out for being either proprietary or unproven. In common with much policy during the Thatcherite 1980s, eyes turned to America for inspiration.The American AMPS was a proven standard and would have been ideal, but it operated at frequencies already occupied in the UK. So a tweaked standard based on AMPS, rather grandly called Total Access Communications System, or TACS, was quickly agreed.
The first cellular phone call in the United Kingdom over the new service was made on New Yearâs Day 1985, fittingly from St Katherineâs Dock in the City of London to Vodafoneâs headquarters in Newbury, 50 miles west in the Berkshire countryside. (One of the callers was the comedian Ernie Wise.) Cellnet launched in the same month. However, neither Cellnet nor Vodafone was an instant success. In a final desperate, and successful, appeal to market forces, a further layer of competition was introduced. Service providers, small entrepreneurial firms, took over the task of selling cellular phones to the public. With the instincts of a barrow-boy trader, these easy-come, easy-go firms aggressively pushed mobile phones to punters. Some private fortunes were made. Many providers would later be swallowed up into more respectable groupings, such as Carphone Warehouse and Hutchison Telecommunications. But by then the cellular phone provided a growing business for Vodafone and Cellnet, and symbolised the 1980s ethos of competition. The brick-like cellphone clasped to the ear became part of the conspicuous consumption exhibited by the City high-flyer â in cliché, the trappings of the yuppie.
Ayoung urban professional uses a Telecom Coral cellular phone as a driverless train arrives on the Docklands Light Railway. The chunky mobile phone and the development of the Canary Wharf site in East London were entwined symbols of the Thatcher years. (BT Archives)
Themarketing of mobile phones in the 1980s was aimed squarely at businessmen and women. The following exhortation from 1986, from the instructions issued to the sales force of British Telecom Mobile Cellphones, is especially revealing:
Turning Idle Time into Productive Time
When youâre away from your office and your phone, youâre effectively out of touch with your business. You canât be contacted. Nor can you easily make contact yourself. Take a mobile telephone â a Cellphone â with you and you get a double benefit. Youâre totally in touch, ready to take instant advantage of business opportunities when and where they occur. And you can make maximum effective use of âdead timeâ â time spent travelling â turning it into genuine productive hours.
A society in constant touch was partly created by this economic rationale of squeezing in ever greater quantities of productive work. Resurrecting âdead timeâ â the phrase could equally well refer to time spent with family or at leisure â and reclaiming it in the service of capital.
The end of âdead timeâ. A businessman is still at work while taking a London black cab, 1985. (BT Archives)
In 1989, competition for three more licences was announced. While it was hoped that these services, called Personal Communications Networks (PCN), would be highly distinctive â more downmarket thanTACS, cheaper than the GSM under way across the English Channel â in fact, they were to all intents and purposes indistinguishable. (The PCN proposals were loathed by the continental Europeans. It was seen by the Germans and French, in particular, as an affront to the spirit of European cooperation represented by
A committee, the Joint Radiotelephone Interfaces Group, on which all the governmental and business parties were represented, decided which cellular standard to adopt. The Nordic NMT was rejected because it would not provide enough capacity for central London. Other possibilities were ruled out for being either proprietary or unproven. In common with much policy during the Thatcherite 1980s, eyes turned to America for inspiration.The American AMPS was a proven standard and would have been ideal, but it operated at frequencies already occupied in the UK. So a tweaked standard based on AMPS, rather grandly called Total Access Communications System, or TACS, was quickly agreed.
The first cellular phone call in the United Kingdom over the new service was made on New Yearâs Day 1985, fittingly from St Katherineâs Dock in the City of London to Vodafoneâs headquarters in Newbury, 50 miles west in the Berkshire countryside. (One of the callers was the comedian Ernie Wise.) Cellnet launched in the same month. However, neither Cellnet nor Vodafone was an instant success. In a final desperate, and successful, appeal to market forces, a further layer of competition was introduced. Service providers, small entrepreneurial firms, took over the task of selling cellular phones to the public. With the instincts of a barrow-boy trader, these easy-come, easy-go firms aggressively pushed mobile phones to punters. Some private fortunes were made. Many providers would later be swallowed up into more respectable groupings, such as Carphone Warehouse and Hutchison Telecommunications. But by then the cellular phone provided a growing business for Vodafone and Cellnet, and symbolised the 1980s ethos of competition. The brick-like cellphone clasped to the ear became part of the conspicuous consumption exhibited by the City high-flyer â in cliché, the trappings of the yuppie.
Ayoung urban professional uses a Telecom Coral cellular phone as a driverless train arrives on the Docklands Light Railway. The chunky mobile phone and the development of the Canary Wharf site in East London were entwined symbols of the Thatcher years. (BT Archives)
Themarketing of mobile phones in the 1980s was aimed squarely at businessmen and women. The following exhortation from 1986, from the instructions issued to the sales force of British Telecom Mobile Cellphones, is especially revealing:
Turning Idle Time into Productive Time
When youâre away from your office and your phone, youâre effectively out of touch with your business. You canât be contacted. Nor can you easily make contact yourself. Take a mobile telephone â a Cellphone â with you and you get a double benefit. Youâre totally in touch, ready to take instant advantage of business opportunities when and where they occur. And you can make maximum effective use of âdead timeâ â time spent travelling â turning it into genuine productive hours.
A society in constant touch was partly created by this economic rationale of squeezing in ever greater quantities of productive work. Resurrecting âdead timeâ â the phrase could equally well refer to time spent with family or at leisure â and reclaiming it in the service of capital.
The end of âdead timeâ. A businessman is still at work while taking a London black cab, 1985. (BT Archives)
In 1989, competition for three more licences was announced. While it was hoped that these services, called Personal Communications Networks (PCN), would be highly distinctive â more downmarket thanTACS, cheaper than the GSM under way across the English Channel â in fact, they were to all intents and purposes indistinguishable. (The PCN proposals were loathed by the continental Europeans. It was seen by the Germans and French, in particular, as an affront to the spirit of European cooperation represented by
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