Nordic Mobile Telephone - History

History

The NMT network was opened in Sweden and Norway in 1981, and in Denmark and Finland in 1982. Iceland joined in 1986. However, the first commercial service was introduced in Saudi Arabia on 1 September 1981 to 1,200 users, one month before Sweden. By 1985 the network had grown to 110,000 subscribers in Scandinavia and Finland, 63,300 in Norway alone, which made it the world's largest mobile network at the time.

The NMT network has mainly been used in the Nordic countries, Latvia, Switzerland, Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Turkey, Croatia, Bosnia, Baltic countries and Russia and in Asia. The introduction of digital mobile networks such as GSM has reduced the popularity of NMT and the Nordic countries have suspended their NMT networks. In Finland TeliaSonera's NMT network was suspended on 31 December 2002. Norway's last NMT network was suspended on 31 December 2004. Sweden's TeliaSonera NMT network was suspended on 31 December 2007. The NMT network (450 MHz) however has one big advantage over GSM which is the range; this advantage is valuable in big but sparsely populated countries such as Iceland. In Iceland, the GSM network reaches 98% of the country's population but only a small proportion of its land area. The NMT system however reaches most of the country and a lot of the surrounding waters, thus the network was popular with fishermen and those traveling in the interior. In Iceland NMT service was stopped on 1 September 2010, when Síminn closed down its NMT network.

In Denmark, Norway and Sweden the NMT-450 frequencies has been given to Swedish Nordisk Mobiltelefon (Sweden) that later became Ice.net and renamed to Net 1 that built a digital network using CDMA 450. The permission for TeliaSonera to continue operation of NMT-450 ended on 31 December 2007.

In Russia Uralwestcom shut down their NMT network on 1 September 2006 and Sibirtelecom on 10 January 2008.