Just over twenty years ago, if you wanted a phone service, you could get one.. from Telstra. And that was it. Today marks an anniversary of sorts in Australian telecommunications, as Optus is twenty years old today, at least in terms of when it started commercial operations.
It was on the 9th of August 1981 that Australia’s first mobile call was made on Telecom’s original public mobile network. The car phone weighed a whopping 14kg, was half a metre big and cost $5000 at the time — around $17,000 in today’s terms. It could only store 16 numbers, and the best part: you were alerted of incoming calls by honking the car horn or flashing the headlights!
After questioning the purpose of futurising the technology in the new NBN education video this morning, PC & Tech Authority editor Nic Healey flung me a message on Twitter pointing me to this historic documentation of what Broadband would offer Australia back in the heady days of 1992. You have to watch it.
