| Inventor
of the GSM system
The Swedes and the Finns earn big
money on mobile telephony. But the system they use is Norwegian.
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Torleiv
Maseng is regarded as the father of the GSM technology.
Contact: Odd Trandem, SINTEF IKT
Tel: +47 73 59 26 73
Email:odd.trandem@sintef.no
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| Photo: Kristin Svorte |
If modern mobile telephony can be said to
have originated anywhere, it would be with Torleiv Maseng (picture).
In the 1980s, he worked in Trondheim and developed a standard that
would revolutionise the world. “Perhaps the Norwegian system
won out because we were really just a couple of friends playing
around,” he says.
“Everybody else had big, cumbersome
organisations, and a serious demand for profit.” Torleiv Maseng,
promoter of mobile telephony, thinks back on the time.
It was 1987, and he was project leader at
Sintef/Elab, which was working on Norway’s contribution to
a radio element for the new European digital mobile telephone standard.
In cooperation with Odd Trandem, he came up with an idea that became
the foundation for a worldwide technological revolution.
FROM NORDIC TO EUROPEAN
In the 1980s, the analogue mobile telephone system NMT 900 had a
monopoly in Scandinavia. Mobile phones of the day were big and heavy.
They actually had to be mounted in cars to be «mobile».
When Mr. Maseng joined SINTEF in 1981, a project from the Norwegian
Telecom company and Scandinavia’s other telecom suppliers
awaited him.
His task was to develop a new digital mobile
telephone system for Scandinavia as a replacement for the NMT system.
Before long, the Scandinavians merged with a pan-European project
with the same goal. This project was led by the European Conference
of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations – CEPT. At
first, disagreements nearly crippled the entire integration process.
Eventually, the EU intervened, and in 1987 the ball started rolling
again. By then, 15 European countries had agreed to adopt the new
standard proposed by CEPT.
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Photo:
Fredrik Oftebro, Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology
One of the reasons Norway won the
GSM standard competition in 1987 was the Cray supercomputer
that came to NTH in 1986. Today, it is in storage at the Norwegian
Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo. |
A TOUR OF PARIS
Several of the participating countries had long been working on
their own systems and had developed very strong opinions about the
way things ought to be. The CEPT companies therefore agreed to choose
a winner based on objective testing.
In February 1987, eight systems from five
different countries – Germany, France, Sweden, Finland and
Norway – were in the running for creating the new standard.
Some competitors were backed by major companies, such as Bosch,
Philips, Mobira (Nokia) and Ericsson. Eight cars were outfitted
with equipment from each candidate system.
The systems would be driven around Paris
and the system’s transmission capacity and ability to continuously
correct errors would be measured in the city’s narrow, windy
streets. The system that transmitted the most data with the fewest
errors would win. At first, the international press did not think
the Norwegian GSM contribution was likely to win. In September 1986,
the journal Communications Systems Worldwide wrote:
“Since ELAB is attached to a Technical
institute and has no manufacturing capability, it would appear to
have little chance of success.”
A CLEAR VICTOR
However, when the test was finished, the conclusion was clear: The
Norwegian system was best. The British popular science journal New
Scientist confused the source of the Norwegian system slightly when
it described the victory as follows: The winner was a surprise.
It was a system called ELAB, which was developed not by a large
company, but by the University of Trondheim in Norway.
“We knew in advance,” says Torleiv
Maseng with a smile, when Gemini met him at his current work place,
the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment at Kjeller.
He says that Odd Trandem had simulated the
test situation in Paris with the Norwegian system after the results
from the other tests had been made public. He was able to do this
because the Norwegian entry was the last to be tested in the competition.
“The (simulated) results were so convincing we knew we would
win,” Mr. Maseng says.
All those trips around Orkdals fjord to measure
how the system would handle reflected signals and radio interference
from the valley walls had not been in vain. And test rounds in Stockholm
to see how the system would work in the city had borne fruit.
FJORDS AND MOUNTAINS
What was so special about the Norwegian system that enabled it to
dominate the well-funded Germans and French entries?
“The most important reason we prevailed
was that our system was the best in handling the interference created
when radio signals are reflected by buildings and topography,”
Mr. Maseng says.
“As the number of reflected signals
increases, there is a greater chance that the radio transmitter
or receiver gets confused and mixes up the signals. Norway has an
abundance of those kinds of natural topographic challenges.”
A central concept in understanding how the
system works is bandwidth. Bandwidth can be compared with the speed
at which people talk. In this analogy, the faster you talk, the
higher the bandwidth. But high bandwidth can be a problem in places
with lots of reflected signals. The same problem explains why most
hymns are sung slowly in church. If they are sung quickly, the acoustics
of the church turn the hymn into an unintelligible mess.
This phenomenon also confounds radio signals.
But Mr. Maseng and Mr. Trandem came up with a clever solution. The
problem is that if the data speed is too high, the receiving equipment
cannot deal with signals that ‘hang in the air’ at the
same time, and the signal becomes chaotic. But if the bandwidth
is too low, there is a greater chance that the signal will disappear
because the receiving equipment cannot distinguish between different
echoes.
Maseng and Trandem altered their bandwidth
during testing; they could do this because they devised a way to
see their results in real time. By doing this they were able to
find the optimal bandwidth between the two extremes. Their competitors
could not. The two researchers were clever, but they also had a
powerful tool to help them: A Cray supercomputer, purchased by NTNU’s
predecessor, NTH, in 1986. “The computing power of the Cray
was a great help in finding the optimal bandwidth,” Odd Trandem
says.
OUT INTO THE WORLD
Europe was a pioneer in mobile telephony. The United States developed
many parallel telephone systems, but lacked a central coordinating
authority. When the US discovered that Europe had developed a system
that functioned well, American companies started developing a GSM
system as well. The only difference between the USA and Europe was
that the two frequencies reserved for mobile telephony in Europe
were already taken in the US. That meant the Americans had to choose
a new frequency range. You can see the result today in what are
known as triband phones, offered by several phone manufacturers.
A triband phone can send and receive European frequencies as well
as American ones. The rest of the world soon adopted the GSM technology,
and chose the same two frequencies as Europe.
TWO BILLION KRONER SAVED
The company destined to launch Norway into the mobile phone age
was named Simonsen Elektro. For many years, Simonsen Elektro produced
equipment for the NMT system. However, not enough money had been
set aside for the new GSM system, and when Simonsen Elektro’s
main partner, Elektrisk Bureau, was bought up by the Swedish company
Ericsson, the purchase doomed Simonsen.
Ericsson and the Finnish company Nokia have
become the leading mobile telephone companies worldwide –
but their success is based on GSM technology originally developed
in Norway. Nevertheless, Norway did not leave the business empty-handed
– although the rewards were not what you might think. A research
report published by the Norwegian Institute for Studies in Research
and Higher Education (NIFU) concluded that the adoption of the Norwegian
system saved Norway some NOK 2 billion (in 1986). The French–German
system,which was the strongest competitor,was developed for a flatter
landscape and would have required far more investment in aerial
and base station equipment to function properly in Norway.
Even Gran
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