A story that's never been told?

Emptying a storage space at home this weekend, I found something that took me way, way back, recalling a story I doubt has ever been told. This something is the Olivetti OCT305 hand-portable 900MHz TACS phone, launched on the Italian market around April 1990. Seen on the left, it was my first mobile phone, and I had a substantial role in making it happen. This is not just an uninteresting footnote in history, because it may have played an important role in helping Nokia dominate the mobile phone industry for the subsequent 20 years.

To begin at the beginning. In 1988 I left PA Technology, near Cambridge, where I had been part of teams working at the forefront of digital mobile communications. In Britain, mobile telephony based on the analogue 900MHz TACS network was taking off - that year Racal Vodafone and BT Cellnet together had over 500,000 subscribers, a colossal number for an industry previously hidebound by expensive, poorly-connected carphones using obsolete 450MHz technology. There was even a handful of handheld phones - the most aspirational of which was called the Excell PC105, the yuppy's must-have accessory. The size of a paper-backed book, it was a conceptual leap ahead of the famous Motorola bricks that were - and are still - such symbols of the era. It was produced by a small tech startup in unfashionable Basingstoke, founded by a Swedish former Ericsson executive Nils Martensson.

I arrived in Italy to establish a new mobile communications business for Olivetti. At that time, Olivetti was one of the world's largest IT companies, second only to IBM in its production of personal computers, riding on the success of the spectacularly successful M24. It was an unusual IT business, having built its success on typewriters and calculators, yet also on the invention of the world's first desk-top computer, and with a great line in snazzy designer office furniture. It displayed great flexibility of product vision, ready to accommodate the new needs of its office customers. And it had understood that the next new need would be mobile communications. That's why I was there, invited by then R&D Director Dr Hermann Hauser and supported by the Vice Chairman, the extraordinary Elserino Piol.

Young and callow, one of my first acts was a thoughtless discourtesy. Granted an audience with the head of mobile communications for SIP (the forerunner of Telecom Italia), I asked him why Italy was so far behind in the field? The country still only had a largely unused 450MHz carphone network. This seemed pretty primitive to me especially in the country which, the previous year, had celebrated il sorpasso, when its GDP overtook that of the UK. To his credit, he humoured this rude Englishman, and explained that a modern 900MHz network was planned, to open in time for the Italia '90 World Cup two years later. There was still the matter of the technology of this network: would it be the Anglo-American TACS system championed by Motorola, or the Nordic NMT900 sponsored by Ericsson? This was a political and economic decision, not simply a technical choice, and was being debated in great secrecy.

A few months afterwards, I wrote a strategy paper for Elserino Piol, forecasting that within three years of launch there would be 1.5m subscribers in Italy, and urging Olivetti to get into the handset business. After all, its distribution network of office equipment retailers would be the ideal channel to market. Piol's strategy staff fell about laughing. The very idea that Italians, famously resistant to the adoption of new technology, would flock to this new gimmick was surely the raving of this ignorant, cocksure Englishman. It was assurdo, ridiculous.

Piol didn't think so. He had the vision to believe me, and task me with making it happen. One of his staff was appointed to keep an eye on me.

The big problem was that no one - no one - knew whether it would be TACS or NMT900, and it was impossible to source, negotiate or close OEM deals without that knowledge.

But I was curious to start the process, and began to visit those European vendors who would answer my calls. I visited an amazing startup near Trieste, which years later has become Telit, one of the world's leading providers of cellular modems. Too small, no scale. I visited Nokia Mobile Phones in Espoo, and found a primitive, messy place which did not impress at all. And I visited Nils Martensson in Basingstoke.

I found an outstandingly modern, leading-edge production facility, staffed with bright, talented engineers and commercial people. It was light-years ahead of anywhere else.

But we still didn't know if it was to be TACS or NMT900, and it was summer 1989. The network was due to open in April 1990. We were running out of time.

And then I went to Finland to attend a GSM meeting. Engineers from all over Europe spent the time discussing how the digital mobile communications standards needed to evolve, while taking saunas and drinking beer (often simultaneously). On the way back, I travelled to Helsinki airport with SIP's head of mobile communications, whose sensibilities I had offended the previous year. A taciturn man, he did not engage in small talk, even when we went for a beer awaiting our flights - his to Rome, mine to Turin - to be called. Yet suddenly he turned to me, and said simply "Bud, it's TACS". And returned to study his beer in silence.

As soon as I returned, I raced to report this to Sig. Piol. He told me and my colleague, Ernesto Rampa, to get on with it, and fast. We immediately began negotiations to secure an exclusive OEM deal for Italy from Technophone. Our counterpart there was a young and very bright commercial manager, Martyn Ratcliffe, who went on to a most illustrious career elsewhere. The news had not yet leaked, so we were the only bidder and rapidly secured a deal that was good for Olivetti, but also good for Technophone. At the time, I recall their sales of the PC105 were flagging, and Olivetti would be the launch customer for their brand new model. We could be the saviours of their business, while securing the rights to the world's best hand-portable phone.

And it was the world's best. Sleek, curved, beautifully proportioned, with a long battery life, it was an astonishingly brilliant product. Manufactured using small geometry surface-mount technology, it represented the state of the art worldwide.

Olivetti was the only competitor to SIP to launch a handportable on the market when the TACS 900 network opened, as planned, in April 1990. Other vendors sold their dowdy carphones and briefcase phones, but Olivetti triumphed. With a combination of an outstanding product, dense distribution and stylish, intensive marketing (see the pic), I recall we won something like 30%-50% of the market overnight, and kept it. I think Olivetti netted about Lire70bn in less than two years.

Of course, that's what the SIP network people had wanted. They knew vigorous competition in the handset market would be key to driving adoption, and adoption was vital for the success of their new, and very expensive network. Within 3 years, they had 1.5m subscribers.

It gave Olivetti an early insight into the dynamics of the mobile handset market, which would prove invaluable four years later when the company's Omnitel-Pronto Italia consortium bid for and won the first competitor GSM licence in Italy.

Meanwhile Technophone signed OEM deals elsewhere too, including in Germany, but I don't believe any of them came close to the sheer scale of the business they did with Olivetti. The Olivetti volumes turbo-charged the firm, and gave it both the resources to invest in the development and manufacture of GSM phones, and the international profile to be taken seriously.

In fact, in 1991 Nokia - whose factories had so underwhelmed me two years earlier - bought Technophone. I am told that much of Nokia's subsequent GSM development leading to the world-changing 2110 model was done in Basingstoke. Did Technophone's people and technology launch Nokia into its 20 year primacy of the handset business? I think so, but others may know better. Did Olivetti's vast volumes make that possible? I am convinced they did.

I used my Olivetti 305 for five years. Children's births, major business deals, the novel experience of improvising meet-ups. Like many phones of the time, the antenna was removable; in 1996 we summered in a cottage in the natural park of Mont Avic where there was absolutely no coverage. A colleague lent me a 20dB tuned Yagi antenna, which when pointed at a rockface 10 miles away could pick up faint reflections from the valley floor. Coax cable brought that signal to my not-so-portable, enabling my family to inform me instantly of the death of my 97 year-old grandmother. For me, mobile communications had never just been a technology or a business, but a way to improve and enrich people's lives, and that day I felt it for myself.

You can read more about Nils Martensson and Technophone. And I intend to donate my newly-recovered OCT to Ben Wood's wonderful Mobile Phone Museum.