The first mobile call

IF there is one piece of technology that has touched the lives of most people in modern human history, it is the mobile phone. For several decades after India gained Independence, the first exposure to modern technology for an average family was a bicycle, a wrist watch or a transistor radio. Anyone who grew up in India in the 1960s and 1970s, as I did, will tell you that owning a phone was a luxury. The waiting period for a telephone connection was anywhere between five and seven years. Households with a phone connection were in high demand among neighbours because they could use the facility for receiving calls. They would share the number as PP (private party) number. To avoid unauthorised use, owners used to keep their phones locked (the dialler was locked with a tiny padlock just as screen locks on today’s smartphones!).

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People of my generation have truly witnessed the communication revolution in their lifetime — from no landline phones to the era of the all-pervasive smartphones. Though the mobile phone was invented 50 years ago — the first call was made on April 3, 1973, by its inventor Martin Cooper in New York — it took almost two decades for it to become a consumer item even in the West.

Like the landline phone, the mobile phone was a luxury in the beginning. In the 1980s, it was priced at around $4,000 in America. The size of such phones was huge — almost a foot — earning it the moniker of a ‘brick phone’. The first mobile phone I used in the mid-1990s was slightly smaller than a brick but it still did not fit in any pocket. It must have been priced close to Rs 50,000. The television production company for which I worked had rented a few handsets for reporters going on field assignments. It was a huge contraption with a dialling pad, a protruding antenna and a blaring ringtone. Remember, it was just a phone, you could only talk. No texting, no pictures and no email.

Few would know that India entered the mobile telephony age on January 1, 1987, when Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited launched its ‘Mobile Radio Phone Service’ in Delhi. It was a rudimentary car phone service that allowed users to talk while on the move using a phone unit fixed in the car. Just a few dozen such phones were installed.

In 1992, private companies were licensed to offer cellular mobile telephone service in the four metros. The inaugural commercial cellular mobile call was made by West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu from Calcutta to Communications Minister Sukh Ram in New Delhi on July 31, 1995. The service in Calcutta was offered by Modi-Telstra (a joint venture of BK Modi group and Telstra of Australia). A few months later, Bharti Cellular rolled out the service in Delhi.

Taking on a mobile phone was costly — Rs 16.80 per minute for making a call and Rs 8.40 per minute for receiving one. It took a few more years for phone companies to start offering General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), which was the first generation (1G) data technology.

A series of twists and turns over the next two decades — policy changes, marketing innovations like pre-paid service and ‘chota recharge’, new processing technologies, aggressive rollout plans, expansion of service networks, local manufacturing — have all culminated to make mobile phones affordable to Indians. High call charges are a thing of the past. From GPRS, we have moved to superfast data speeds. Mobile phones are not just for making ‘emergency calls’ as they used to be, but are being used for everything from entertainment to banking. I remember that as kids, we used to joke that it would be cool if we could see an image of the person calling us when we answered the landline phone. Video calls are indeed child’s play now. The future is here.

Pitstops in India’s cell phone revolution

Missed call The high price of talk time on mobile phones led to many innovative uses of mobile phones by consumers. Usually, when you call a number and the called person does not take the call, it is considered a missed call. To save on talk time, people started making missed calls intentionally to convey pre-determined messages like ‘call me back’, ‘I have reached’. It is a favourite means of communication between employers and their staff like drivers and domestic workers who may have limited talk time. A missed call is being frequently deployed as a marketing tool by companies, political parties and government departments.

Pre-paid and chota recharge In the journey to make the mobile phone an everyday tool for common people, the introduction of pre-paid service was a turning point. Instead of paying a bill at the end of a month, people could buy talk time and use it as per their needs during a specified period. A further innovation was ‘chota recharge’ or micro recharge coupons for as low as Rs 5 as against a monthly recharge of Rs 200 or Rs 300. This proved to be a game-changer that made the mobile phone service affordable even for a daily wage-earner like a vegetable seller or a farm worker. A microdata pack is available for as low as Rs 16 for 1 GB of data.

Phone service as FMCG SIM cards and recharge services have been made widely available in local grocery stores, pharmacies and paan shops. In addition to serving as a ‘point of presence’ for telecom firms, these franchisees deal with subscriber issues informally, just like customer relations employees in company stores. Selling the phone and service became like marketing ‘fast-moving consumer goods’ (FMCG).

— The writer is a science commentator