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

[inquisitor]

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.