History of GSM

During the early 1980s, analog cellular telephone systems were experiencing rapid growth in Europe, particularly in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, but also in France and Germany.  Each country developed its own system, which was incompatible with everyone else's in equipment and operation.  This was an undesirable situation, because not only was the mobile equipment limited to operation within national boundaries, which in a unified Europe were increasingly unimportant, but there was a very limited market for each type of equipment, so economies of scale, and the subsequent savings, could not be realized.

The Europeans realized this early on, and in 1982 the Conference of European Posts and Telegraphs (CEPT) formed a study group called the Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSM) to study and develop a pan­European public land mobile system.  The proposed system had to meet certain criteria:

• good subjective speech quality,

• low terminal and service cost,

• support for international roaming,

• ability to support handhald terminals,

• support for range of new services and facilities,

• spectral efficiency, and

• ISDN compatibility.

In 1989, GSM responsibility was transferred to the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI), and phase I of the GSM specifications were published in 1990.  Commercial service was started in mid­1991, and by 1993 there were 36 GSM networks in 22 countries, with 25 additional countries having already selected or considering GSM [DS93].  This is not only a European standard - South Africa, Australia, and many Middle and Far East countries have chosen GSM.  By the beginning of 1994, there were 1.3 million subscribers worldwide [Nil].  The acronym GSM now (aptly) stands for Global System for Mobile telecommunications.

The developers of GSM chose an unproven (at the time) digital system, as opposed to the then­standard analog cellular systems like AMPS in the United States and TACS in the United Kingdom.  They had faith that advancements in compression algorithms and digital signal processors would allow the fulfillment of the original criteria and the continual improvement of the system in terms of quality and cost.  The 8000 pages of the GSM recommendations try to allow flexibility and competitive innovation among suppliers, but provide enough guidelines to guarantee the proper interworking between the components of the system.  This is done in part by providing descriptions of the interfaces and functions of each of the functional entities defined in the system.