Nordic Mobile Telephone
NMT (Nordisk MobilTelefoni or Nordiska MobilTelefoni-gruppen, Nordic Mobile Telephony in English) is the first fully automatic cellular phone system. It was specified by Nordic telecommunications administrations (PTTs) and opened for service in 1 October 1981 as a response to the increasing congestion and heavy requirements of the manual mobile phone networks: ARP (150 MHz) in Finland and MTD (450 MHz) in Sweden and Denmark and OLT in Norway.
NMT is based on analog technology (first generation or 1G) and two variants exist: NMT-450 and NMT-900. The numbers indicate the frequency bands uses. NMT-900 was introduced in 1986 because it carries more channels than the previous NMT-450 network.
The NMT specifications were free and open, allowing many companies to produce NMT hardware and pushing the prices down. The success of NMT meant a lot to Nokia (then Mobira) and Ericsson. First Danish implementers were Storno (then owned by General Electric, later taken over by Motorola) and AP (later taken over by Philips). Initial NMT phones were designed to mount in the trunk of a car, with a keyboard/display unit at the drivers seat. "Portable" versions existed: one could definitely move them, but they were bulky, and battery lifetime was a big problem. Latter-day models (such as Benefon's) were as small as 100 mm (3.9 inches) and weighed only about 100 grams.
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