Nowadays, as soon as we have some down time, we turn to our mobile: either to scroll infinitely on Instagram or to catch up on email. Although what defined the basis of today’s smartphones was the first iPhone in 2007, the professional point began before, with the blackberry 5810 and your email in 2002 or we can even go back to Nokia 9000 ’96, which introduced the keyboard and its business approach. The late 90s were the beginning of turning the mobile phone into an everyday object.
I’m driving and I need a call now. Of course, back in the 90s, carrying a cell phone in the car and answering a work call was unthinkable. Or not, because someone thought of it an exclusive telephone service for drivers in Barcelona pre-Olympic Games. The target audience was those people who were so busy that they could not afford to be disconnected while traveling through the congested business areas of the city.
The operation. As they narrate on the Catalan regional television 3Cat, if in the middle of a traffic jam you were lucky enough to find one of those people in white overalls on a scooter, with a fanny pack and the phone stuffed in a shoulder bag, you could ask them. A uniform as characteristic as the backpacks of today’s delivery drivers, but much less common: at that time there were only five workers moving through the busiest traffic points in Barcelona, although they wanted to increase it to 25.
If you are standing, they leave you the headset. And if you move, they lend you the device and follow you until you complete the call. The price of the service was 25 pesetas and the minimum call price is 300 pesetas.
Because? To begin with, because in 1990 if you wanted to call on the street what there was were booths and analog technology, in Spain specifically MoviLine: the first mobile operator to deploy the original 1G network, owned by Telefónica. And if we talk about devices, the mythical Motorola MicroTAC It was a status symbol for executives. A symbol measuring 23 centimeters and weighing 350 grams.
Yes, there were some mobile phones, but they were heavy, with very long antennas and batteries that barely lasted a couple of hours in conversation. On the other hand, having a phone installed in the car was expensive and niche. But the business was not just the telephone, but mobility and time. As businessman Josep Marí says, his idea was “to create the need to find a mobile phone to be able to call to work, home or wherever.”
Ahead of his time. This “Automatic Mobile Telephony” service was ahead of its time in that it had a vision of a future need, but faced a market that was not yet ready. As the 90s progressed, telephone technology became more refined and democratized.
1995 brought GSM to the Spanish state on the one hand and, on the other, the liberalization of the telecommunications market, which inaugurated airtel. The operators began to directly control distribution and technical service with franchises and distributors, leaving little room for local independent companies.
Scooters before the scooter craze. And if the service itself is surprising, so is the means of transportation: a scooter with a gasoline engine, more specifically the Sport model. of the Go-Ped brand, but quite similar in design and concept to the electric ones that swarm our streets today. His virtue was exactly the same: moving quickly and agilely through the density of Barcelona’s traffic to be able to get in front of the client.
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Cover | 3Cat via Marc Vidal edited with Gemini
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