Classroom Companion: Business

part of the current Internet.
The early Internet was mainly used 
at universities and research establish-
ments. The network was hardly known 
outside these circles until the World 
Wide Web was commercialized and 
taken into use by several telecommuni-
cations carriers in 1993 and, thereby, 
becoming available to the public. The 
WWW technology had been invented by 
Tim Berners-Lee at CERN already in 
1989, but since it was not invented by the 
telecommunications industry, it took a 
long time until they discovered the 
potential the new technology would have 
for the data communication market, a 
market the carriers had strived to build 
up for more than a decade without suc-
ceeding.
 
Chapter 2 ·
Information and Communication Technologies

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23
2
The Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT), released in 1981, was the world’s first 
automatic cellular mobile telephony system. It introduced automatic roaming and 
handover but supported only voice communication. The Global System for Mobile 
Communications (GSM)—supporting voice, messaging, and data services—pio-
neered digital radio communication (1991). Initially, data communication was slow 
(less than 10 kilobits per second) and ineffective, but the data rate was later enhanced 
by technologies such as GPRS and EDGE. High-speed data, particularly on the link 
from base station to mobile terminal (usually referred to as the downlink), was intro-
duced in 3G mobile systems (2003). The broadband technology was developed fur-
ther in the 4G mobile systems launched in 2009. The latest mobile technology, 5G, 
was used at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea and is now (2020) being rolled 
out on a large scale in Europe, Asia, and North America. 5G will support the Internet 
of Things (IoT). The family tree for mobile networks is contained in 
7
Box 
2.3
.