the nostalgy thread | all about the early days of mobile telephony
 

Sure, I meant 2007. 1997 was exactly the year, when the first dualband handset was released in Germany. It was the "eplus Traveller" (aka Motorola 8900), which was the first device with vibration and you had to switch between GSM900 and 1800 manually.

Wow. I'm curious: When did the first tri-band (900/1800/1900) GSM phone get released? Also, were dual-band 900/1900 devices common among travellers yet?

The first triband phone was the Motorola Timeport P7389, which came in 2000. Dualband phones were not very common in the late 1990s, since GSM1800 networks had little coverage and so started with cheaper tariffs, which attracted mostly private customers, who in turn were price-conscious and so not ready to spend those crazy roaming rates back then. So there was little demand for roaming on GSM900 abroad from GSM1800-users, while business people used GSM900-phones and operators due to the better coverage anyway. I think the demand for dualband phones came primarily from Scandinavian network operators, who were the first to be issued licenses for both frequencies (900 & 1800) and so to run dualband networks, requiring handsets, that could operate on both frequency bands.

Maybe we should open a nostalgy thread for this topic.

I'm with you! Good idea... so sorry if this is going OT.

I remember the first dual band phone that I used in late 1998. It was a dark purple Nokia 6110 and belonged to my big sister who was working in Germany at the time. Even though it was for her I was the one who read up on it and told her what to get! ;) She was well impressed with how small it was. (though it can be considered a brick these days!)

At the time it was quite an expensive handset and really the fact it was dual band was marketed as such a big deal! It was with Viag Intercom who were a small GSM 1800 network in Germany but had some funny deal with Swiss telecom (I think), so that their customers could "roam" on the larger D1 network in Germany who were on GSM 900. (Hence the real need for dual band phones even for customers who didn't roam internationally). I think calls made on the D1 nework incurred a 10 Pfennig surcharge or something. Perhaps someone else remembers the details better?

the nostalgy thread | all about the early days of mobile telephony
 

Let's continue here.

The 6110 was GSM900, it's dualband version, which your sister had, was designated 6150. I do still own both and the 6150 is still working in my car kit. There was also the 6130, a GSM1800 version and the 6190 for GSM1900. These were great phones and the first ones that could receive logos and ringtones by SMS. I still hate me for neglecting the idea of setting up a logo and ringtone service, which we had brought to a running Linux system with a friend already in 4Q 1997, when we decided no one would actually pay money for having a damn logo in his display, when anyone could do that himself for free with a cheap datacable. A couple of years later logos and ringtones became a multi-million industry.

Viag Interkom (today O2 Germany) still have a national roaming agreement with T-Mobile, which will finally end at the end of next year. However they soon realized the roaming option directly with T-Mobile. Earlier - as you mentioned - Viag had dual-IMSI-SIMs, which had a Viag IMSI and one from Swisscom, which was used for national roaming on T-Mobile, since a direct national roaming faced opposition from T-Mobile and Vodafone also due to legal issues.

@mods
Could you please move the last postings to http://www.prepaidgsm.net/forum/off-...telephony.html ? Thank you! done (beppe_bl)

Close - it was the Timeport L7089, which came out in late 1999. The P7389 was the same phone with a WAP browser (and was, along with the Nokia 7110, just about the first WAP-equipped phone). The 7089 was a blue color, while the 7389 was silver. (My 7389 still works just fine - I got in on 30 January 2000, and remember the date for some reason. You can still use the browser, though it's pretty painful experience.)

I think the big success of dual-band phones, at least here in Italy, was with Wind and the Siemens C25, a cheap and easy phone, in 1999.
Wind had only DCS 1800 coverage, but had roaming agreements with TIM out of the 8 main cities where they had their own coverage. Then national roaming with Omnitel (then Vodafone) arrived too... so a dual-band phone was needed unless you lived in one of those 8 cities (such as me!).

Thanks for that. Interesting the issue with dual imsi sims as a precursor to cheap national roaming way back in 1998.

I think E-Plus was keen on it, in part because in 1997 it was still owned 17 percent by Vodafone, which otherwise owned the UK GSM 900 network or minority holdings in foreign 900 networks (its pre-behemoth business strategy), and this would have enabled roaming on Vodafone-associated networks. (The other owners of E-Plus at the time were non-telcos, as I recall.)

Thanks for that. Interesting the issue with dual imsi sims as a precursor to cheap national roaming way back in 1998.

Regarding the early days of GSM1800 and the idea of dualband networks and handsets I just searched a very old backup and found two interesing historic files:
One is a newsletter from gsmag.com dated to May 5th, 1998, depicting the status of GSM1800-rollouts, which is attached to this posting. It mentions interest of "Estonian Mobile Telephone" for GSM1800 licenses due to the (inbound) roaming revenue, they could generate from visitors with GSM1800-handsets. Apparently Estonians didn't consider dualband handsets to become available or widely spread in these days.

...and the other is an interview with Karl-Erik Eriksson, then president of Telia Mobitel, from November 26th, 1996, in which I first read about "dual-mode handsets", which were considered as "some kind of exclusive, costly, solution", which manufacturers haven't considered back in the days. This one is attached to this posting (had to separate this in two postings, as there's only one attachment allowed per posting).

Hmm. North America only started GSM services around 1995/1996, so we missed out on some of the earlier equipment. Though some manufacturers that are almost purely GSM/etc.-side now made CDMA stuff for us back then, like Nokia. Did many 900/1900 devices exist for travellers between North America and Europe before 900/1800/1900 tri-band became more common or was it more common for travellers to just carry two phones? The BlackBerry 6210, 6710, & 7210 all seem to have this combo, though I wonder if other manufacturers put models like that out.

AFAIK, the Timeport 7039 was the first to feature both US and either European band (remember that 850 MHz came later, with the first trials in 2001). I recall at least two reviews of it at the time of people claiming it didn't work, presumably because they didn't know they had to use the Change Bands command - I'll try to find these.

The only 900/1900-phones I remeber are the Ericsson I888 and the Ericsson T28 world. That combination was rather rare, I think Nokia didn't produce phones with that at all.
For transatlantic travellers cellcos usually offered phone rentals. When I travelled to NYC in 1997 I rented a Nokia 2190 from D2 mannesmann (today Vodafone Germany), which costed me DM 100,- (~ $50) for 4 weeks. Luckily they had some billing problem and my calls were never charged on my account.

my first 'Tri band' phone...Ericsson t68...then two months later going back to wherei bought it to get a firmware upgrade....eeech....so slow.....i mean two mins to send a text...

the firmware made it at least act like the 'Sony ericsson t68i',,,colour screen to....wow...it was my first colour screen phone to

I also had the T68 in the grey Ericsson edition before it was later rebranded to SonyEricsson and the housing turned white. Despite of it's slow user interface, it was a great phone. It was one of the first phones with a joystick as navigation element, a super-light Li-polymer battery and of course it had a COLOUR screen!!!
I still have the wallpaper images, which I resized to fit the T68's display, in order to show my mates the advantages of a colour screen (all participants were over 18 years). Actually I think it was the first real color phone in the market (besides those 4-color displays on the Siemens SL10 and the S25).

they offered a free firmware upgrade in the uk so you could take it to certain places and have a physical t68 but the software was t68i..wow the difference...loved the clip on camera to lol