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

[inquisitor]

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.

[adam917]

Originally Posted by inquisitor

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?

[Effendi]

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!).

[petkow]

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

[petkow]

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

[inquisitor]

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.

[inquisitor]

...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).

[adam917]

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.

[Motel75]

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.

[inquisitor]

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.