The NEC Opera was the first mobile phone designed and made in Australia. Small, light and grey, it's made of plastic with a liquid crystal display. Folding up when not in use is its way of being rugged.

The phone was designed and manufactured in response to the adoption of the digital GSM* standard for mobile communications by some South East Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia). Rapidly industrializing countries in S.E. Asia, Eastern Europe and elsewhere find that it is considerably faster and less costly to construct cellular networks that integrate rather than extend existing wired phone lines.

NEC in Tokyo was unable to respond to the rapid appearance of these new markets - Europe and some Asian countries adopted the digital GSM standard sooner than expected. NEC Australia was in a position to do this - members of the design and development group (61 persons in 1996) at Mulgrave had been working with their UK counterparts on a new mobile phone.

A cellular phone is essentially a two-way radio transceiver that patches into the telephone system via a geographically cellular network of base stations. Rather than communicating directly with another phone handset, it is in contact with the nearest base station, itself a radio transceiver that is directly wired into the plain old telephone system (POTS). The base stations are arranged in a cellular network: as the cellular phone user moves spatially, they cross into a different cell and get handed over to the new base station. This is done in apparent real time, so that the user can continue a call while moving through different cells.

The infrastructure demanded to support mobile phone penetration (geographically and commercially) is large and costly. The erection of transmission towers over densely populated urban zones has impacted upon communities. The towers are veiwed as visual pollution (UGLY) and hazardous (electromagnetic radiation emissions and exposure). The effects of electromagnetic radiation upon users of mobile phones, and passive exposure, are presently the subject of research and controversy.

The initial (1985) consumer base for cellular phones was wealthy people in developed countries. The appeal and use of mobile phones has since (1988) expanded to include executives, trades and small business persons, female family members (marketed with security as the issue), youth markets and new markets in countries without large established infrastructure as mentioned above.

Although the technology is expensive (initial outlay for cellular phone $200-$1,700) and running costs high (average 1997 cost of $800 per user per annum) Australia presently has the highest level of acceptance and use of mobile phones per capita in the world.

Worldwide, Motorola, Ericsson, and Nokia are the dominant cellular phone suppliers, and together they control about 70% of the worldwide market (1997).


*GSM is the acronym for Groupe Special Mobile, a study group formed in 1982 at the Conference of European Posts and Telegraphs (CEPT) to study and develop a pan-European public land mobile system. The proposed system had to meet certain criteria: Good subjective speach quality: Low terminal and service cost: Support for international roaming: Ability to support handheld terminals: Support for range of new services and facilities: Spectral efficiency: ISDN compatibility. In 1989, GSM reponsibility was transferred to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and phase I of the GSM specifications were published in 1990. Commercial service was started in mid-1991. GSM systems now exist on every continent, and the acronym GSM now stands for Global System for Mobile communications.


Campbell Bickerstaff, April 1998
Assistant Curator, Information Technology