Happy 20th birthday GSM – look how you’ve grown

September 6, 2007 Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the signing of the document which created the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network and the fastest technology adoption in history. GSM now serves more than 2.5 billion people, with another 1.2 million new connections every day and there will be 4 billion mobile connections in the world by early 2010 – with GSM accounting for 85% of the world’s mobile connections, mobile is heading for ubiquity in even less developed countries - 64% of mobile users are in emerging markets. The first text message was sent in 1992 and now 7 billion text messages are sent every day. Mobile operators have spent more than US$234 billion building GSM and 3GSM networks in the last five years and last year cellular services accounted for 1.6% of the global economy. So it’s a big happy birfy from us to a technology that, all PR prose aside, is changing the world. The pic is the Nokia 1100 which is the world's best selling phone with more than 200 million units sold.

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