What is GSM?

GSM is a group mobile experts’ name (French: Groupe Spécial Mobile)
acronym. Later, the meaning of the acronym was changed to “Global System
for Mobile Communications” to facilitate the promotion of GSM to the
world. GSM is the world’s most popular standard for mobile phone
systems. It is used by over 1.5 billion people across more than 212
countries and territories. It differences from its predecessor technologies in that both signaling and speech channels are digital, and thus GSM is considered a second generation (2G) mobile phone system.


The early 1980s, the first generation of mobile phone technology began to use, when the existence of many incompatible standards. The user’s mobile phone
can not use on other network criteria, that resulting in great
inconvenience. Because of this reason, Western European countries began
to consider developing unified next generation mobile phone standards.


In 1982, the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications
Administrations (CEPT) created the Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSM) to
develop a standard for a mobile phone system that could be used across
Europe. In May 1987 GSM members agreed to determine the GSM of the most
important of several key technologies. In 1989, GSM responsibility was transferred to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). In 1990, the first edition
of GSM standard has be completion. In 1991 the first GSM network was
launched by Radiolinja in Finland with network infrastructure provided
by Telenokia and Siemens Networks which later on merged as Nokia Siemens
Networks. By the end of 1993, over a million subscribers were using GSM phone networks being operated by 70 carriers across 48 countries.


From a user perspective, GSM can provide higher quality digital voice.
From the network operator point of view, them can deploy equipment from
different vendors, because as an open standard GSM provides easy
interoperability.