Constant Touch
contraction of DeTeMobile, the name that had been given to Deutsche Telekom’s mobile activities in 1993.) Anglo-German commercial interchange continued the following year when Vodafone, less than two decades old and already combined with the American AirTouch Communications, acquired the German technology and media giant Mannesmann, making it one of the largest companies in Europe and one of the top ten companies, measured by market capitalisation, in the world. As part of the same deal, Mannesmann sold Orange (which it had snapped up in 1999) to France Telecom. By 2001 Vodafone had become an international player, with over 80 million customers across the world. Furthermore, Vodafone symbolised another significant shift: for anyone following British industry for much of the 20th century, the idea of a British firm buying a major German technology-based company wouldhave seemed laughable. But Vodafone’s share price, riding a wave of tech-stock enthusiasm, gave it immense purchasing power. However, as we shall see, the market can go down as well as up.
    Competition between One 2 One, Orange, Cellnet and Vodafone had brought prices down and made the mobile phone an everyday object. No longer was it a status symbol – signifying privilege in the 1950s or wealth in the 1980s – but instead the universal accompaniment of young and old alike (although particularly the young). As the mobile trickled down the social scale, it became a great leveller: granting the power of mobile communication and organisation to the shifting, roaming crowds. A population in constant touch.
    Indeed there was an ironic twist in the levelling powers of the mobile phone in 1992. In August, the tabloid
Sun
newspaper devoted ten pages to a taped conversation between Diana, Princess of Wales and James Gilbey, revealing the two to be lovers. The royal marriage, already strained, was in tatters. In December, the same month that Windsor castle burned, the prime minister, John Major, announced the divorce of the Prince and Princess of Wales to the House of Commons. The source of the
Sun
’s revelations, the ‘Squidgy’ tapes, so called after Gilbey’s pet name for Diana, had been recorded by eavesdropping on a conversation over the princess’s mobile phone. It was a sign of a major scandal to come.
    Chapter 10
Decommunisation = capitalist power + cellularisation
    In1920 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of revolutionary Russia, surveyed a country ruined by civil war and racked by starvation, and confidently announced that progress was assured through the rapid construction of a technological network. His slogan was pithy: ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.’ With the fall of communism across central and eastern Europe seven decades later, the nascent liberal democracies were blessed with a small army of economic advisers from the West. Their mantra, heard loudest in Lenin’s homeland, called for the unleashing of entrepreneurial activities, the rapid privatisation of state-owned industries, and the opening of markets to foreign companies. Following close behind the economists were Western cellular phone companies.
    Did you join the network? (With apologies to Dmitry Moor)
    We have already seen how mobile phone systems were built in former East Germany as a way of providing communication services without relying on obsolescent landlines. However, the rise of capitalist power in Russia did not coincide with the cellularisation of the
whole
country. Not only was it too vast, but socialist ideals such as universal coverage had been abandoned. Acondition of gaining a licence, such as those enabling US West and Millicom’s services in Leningrad and Moscow (both from 1991), was that local partners were involved. In the capital, licences were granted, sometimes in return for cash donations to the local powers-that-be, for a number of different standards – yet again thestyle of

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