Free Constant Touch by Jon Agar Page B

technological system was being shaped by political context, in this case the turmoil and confusion of post-Soviet Moscow government. At one stage Bell Canada thought it had won a GSM licence, but then backed out when a surprise demand for $50m was made. Likewise, as Garrard records, it was to the ‘consternation of operators that had received NMT450 or GSM licences [that] AMPS licences were announced for Moscow and three cities in the East of the country’. One of the Moscow licences went to a consortium led by the Cold War defence giant Vimpel. In 1996 VimpelCom, founded by Vimpel’s Dmitry B. Zimin and American investor Augie K. Fabela II, became the first Russian company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. ‘Bee-line’, VimpelCom’s mobile brand, symbolises a new Russia, in which Western investment has put flesh on old Cold War bones.
    Likewise in China, the transition from communism to some form of capitalism was reflected by the spread of mobile base stations. Chinese cellular telephony started in 1988 with a TACS system (i.e. the British standard) in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong province. Two companies, China Mobile and China Unicom, offered increasingly popular GSM-based services in the 1990s. By 2002, China had become the number one mobile country: there were 160 million subscribers, overtaking the United States. Measured by percentage of population, of course, the picture looked somewhat different (onlyjust over 12 per cent of Chinese, compared to nearly 38 per cent of Americans, had cellphones). The potential size of the Chinese market was clearly huge.
    However, Western companies attracted by the market often met a rocky reception. It took nearly a decade of lobbying, for example, for Qualcomm to gain permission to supply a CDMA network to China Unicom, negotiating past tricky moments in China–US relations, such as the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the ramming of an American spy-plane by a Chinese jet in 2001. But Qualcomm’s determination seems to have paid off, and the company hopes to follow Ericsson’s example: the firm’s biggest market is in China, not Europe or the United States.
    Chapter 11
Japanese garden
    Itmight seem strange to have read almost half a book about the development of a new consumer technology without Japan entering the story. In fact, for the first decade of the Japanese cellular phone, there was little to remark upon. Indeed, it paralleled developments in an average European country, for example Spain, where a monopolistic public telephone service introduced an early but expensive system, but take-up rates were low. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), then a public corporation, launched a cellular service around Tokyo, and a smaller one around Osaka, in 1979 – among the first commercial cellphones in the world. But ten years later, only 0.15 per cent of the population had bought the deal.
    Of course, the peerless Japanese electronics manufacturers, such as NEC, Matsushita (under the Pana­sonic brand name) and Sony, supplied equipment to cellular services growing elsewhere in the world. But despite the excellence of the product, export suffered from measures taken to protect American or European markets. By the late 1980s many telecommunications markets were being opened up to competition. However, regulation could take protectionist forms, even if it had been designed for other reasons. In the caseof GSM phones, the thorny and complex problem of patents meant that only a handful of companies (of which only Motorola were non-European) gained access to a highly profitable pan-European market. Japanese firms lay outside the walls of ‘fortress Europe’ for phones. They were also hampered by the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy in the early 1990s, which meant that the manufacturers were distracted, inward-looking and cautious, just as GSM was launched in Europe.
    The Japanese mobile gets interesting