Children born today will never imagine a
time when GSM was just another meaningless and largely unknown acronym. They
won't believe in a time when Telecommunications only meant NITEL and some
archaic cable satellite company. They'll never know that masts once meant TV and
radio stations, and Coca-Cola was the strongest Nigerian brand without any
competitor for their colorful and eye-catching billboards.
I remember the
days of the 090 (naught nine naught) lines - the NITEL cellular handsets of the
90s. If you owned one, you were considered an extremely big boy. You could
receive your calls in any Bank, and no security personnel dared tell you to
switch it off. In fact, you wouldn't even be in the banking hall in the first
place, you would be in the Branch Manager's office receiving preferential
treatment. You would never complain of bad network or poor service, because as
far as you were concerned, you owned the best of the
best.
Those were the days when you had to depend
on luck when going to see a friend, and you had to plan the next appointment
before you parted ways. Woe betide you if you left your house without the proper
address - short of asking from door to door, there was no other way you get
directions. Then, people stuck notepads and pencils on their front doors with
stylish signs which read "Drop a note", and there were charts on doors with
different attributes such as IN, MARKET, BATHROOM, TRAVELED, etc. It was the
time when a man who was working in Lagos and his
lover who was undergoing her NYSC in Kano kept their relationship alive through 6
page letters in the post, letters, which took two to three weeks to get
delivered... and their love survived! It was the time when the only way you
could confirm the safe arrival of your friends was by taking down the
registration number of the commercial vehicle and visiting the park 3-4 days
later to see if the driver was back from the trip.
Land lines existed,
but were only for the rich and influential. The owners would usually lock the
phones with a small padlock so their kids would not make calls and incur phone
bills in their absence. There was usually a house with a phone line in every
neighborhood, and it was common to find different people waiting at houses to
receive a call from a family members residing abroad at a particular time. It
was also common to have a messenger running to your house informing you that you
had a call and the caller was calling back in 5 minutes, and you would quickly
leave all you were doing and run to wait for your call.
Evolution soon
brought the use of phone cards and calling machines from NITEL. People with
phone cards would stand making their calls closely monitoring their units while
they quickly made their calls in as few words as possible. Opportunists soon
emerged, renting out phone cards to make a quick buck, and fables spread about
how an empty phone card could be refilled by freezing it for a number of
days.
Alas, it's now all history, thanks to GSM. Anyone who can cough out
N3000 can get a phone and a line. The average Nigerian now owns a handset he
receives calls with. People have as many as two, three or four lines and are
quick to display all their numbers on their personal business cards. Handsets
have also evolved. At the onset, if you had a Nokia 3310 or 3330, you were a big
boy. If you had a Samsung Blue-I, you were a bigger boy, and if you had a
Samsung True-I or a Motorola V50, you were without equal. Commoners used the
Trium Mars, Motorola Talkabout and the Sagem's first phones. GSM Lines were as
costly as N20000 - N30000, calls were billed by the minute, and the cheapest air
time you could buy was a N500 recharge card from Econet.
Now different
versions of phones exist, with different functionalities such as FM Radio,
Cameras and Video. Phones shaped like planes and those that remind you of
walkie-talkies. We now do everything from running excel sheets to checking out
our facebook pages on our phones. We play music and watch videos, and send
pictures through MMS and bluetooth. The land line is almost forgotten, and the
NITEL Phone booths are non-existent. Recharge cards are sold in every corner,
and the average 7 year old kid knows how to operate his Mum's phone.
The
GSM industry had indeed done a lot of positive things for Nigerians. Apart from
bringing communication within the reach of the common man, it has created
multiple employment opportunities, not only for those who work in the GSM
organizations, but mostly on the streets for recharge card hawkers and phone
call center operators. It has also created a big market for mobile phones, such
that the Computer
Village in Ikeja is no
longer only known for computers but also largely known for mobile phones and
accessories. With the advent of 3G Plus and 3.5G, we will soon be able to watch
movies on our phones, make video calls and enjoy ultra high speed internet. GSM
is here to stay, and will continue to change the way we talk, the way we act and
the way we live.
Long live GSM!
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