Twenty years ago last week, the system underpinning today’s mobile phones got the green light from the leading telecoms operators in 13 European countries.

On September 7, 1987, 15 telecoms operators signed a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ to create the first Europe-wide digital cellular system, which we now know as GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications). It later became world’s first global mobile system, and is now used more than 700 mobile operators.

Today, GSM-based technologies make up 85 per cent of the global mobile services market, which accounts for about 1.6 per cent of global GDP. According to the GSM Association (GSMA), consumers buy more than one billion new handsets every year, make more than 7 trillion minutes of calls and send about 2.5 trillion text messages.

“The 1987 agreement is widely regarded as the foundation of today’s global mobile phone industry and the birth of one of the greatest technological achievements of our age,” said Rob Conway, CEO of the GSMA, the global trade association for mobile operators.

“GSM is the single most important agreement in the history of telecommunications,” added Sir Christopher Gent, one of the original signatories of the agreement and former CEO of Vodafone. “With 2.5 billion users around the world today, it has done more to bridge the digital divide than any other innovation, and is a tremendous example of global cooperation.”

Today, 64 per cent of mobile users live in emerging markets and China has the single largest GSM customer base with 445 million people. Every day, mobile phones users send around 7 billion text messages.

http://www.gsmworld.com/index.shtml