“This thing called "mobile telephony" – do you really think it can become something?” It is 30 years since the first generation of mobile telephony, NMT, Nordic Mobile Telephony, was launched. NMT laid the foundation for the modern mobile communication and the technology marked an important step in the ongoing journey to make the world more mobile.
On October 1, 1981 NMT was launched at Televerket’s switch in Hammarby, a suburb of Stockholm, where the first MTX from Ericsson was installed. In more than 25 years NMT was in operation before it closed down the last day of 2007.
Televerket, later TeliaSonera, was already in the middle of the 1960s an especially strong advocate of the technology and the open standard.
The Nordic NMT-system was groundbreaking, as it provided people in the Nordic countries a totally new possibility of mobile communication. The standard we built it on paved the way for GSM and modern mobile communication technology, which now serves a community of more than 5 billion users worldwide. It is a remarkable achievement that no one could ever dream of. Today, customer demand for communication continues to explode.