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  3. On New Year’s Day, 1985, Michael Harrison phoned his father, Sir Ernest, to

On New Year’s Day, 1985, Michael Harrison phoned his father, Sir Ernest, to

游客2024-08-14  32
问题     On New Year’s Day, 1985, Michael Harrison phoned his father, Sir Ernest, to wish him a Happy New Year. Sir Ernest was chairman of Racal Electronics, the owner of Vodafone, and his son was making the first-ever mobile phone call in the UK.

    Later that morning, comedian Ernie Wise made a very public mobile phone call from St Katherine’s Dock, in East London, to announce that Vodafone was now open for business. A few days later, its only rival. Cell-net, a joint venture between BT and Securicor, was also in business.
At the time, mobile phones weighed almost a kilogram, cost several thousand pounds and, in some cases, provided only 20 minutes of “talk time". The networks themselves were small; Vodafone had just a dozen masts covering London and the area west of London, while Cellnet started with a single mast, stuck on the BT Tower. Neither company had any idea of the huge potential of wireless communication and the dramatic impact that mobile phones would have over the next quarter century.
    "We projected there would only be about a million ever sold, and that we would get about, 35% of the market. BT projected there would be about half a million mobile phones sold and that they would get about 80% of the market, ”remembers Sir Christopher Gent, former Vodafone chief executive who was at St Katherine’s Dock a quarter of a century ago. “In the first year, we sold a-bout 15 , 000 to 20, 000 phones. The portable Motorola was about ￡ 3, 000 but most of the phones we sold were car phones from companies such as Panasonic and Nokia. "
    Hardly anyone believed there would come a day when mobile phones were so popular that there would be more phones in the UK than there are people. But in 1999 one mobile phone was sold in the UK every four seconds, and by 2004 there were more mobile phones in the UK than people.
    The boom was a result of increased competition—which pushed prices lower and created innovations in the way that mobiles were sold, helping put them within the reach of the mass market— and the move to digital technology. [br] Vodafone and Cellnet were the first two mobile phone providers in the UK.
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