Canada’s first wireless phone call took place 40 years ago on July 1, 1985, at Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto.
Then-mayor Art Eggleton used a 10-pound mobile phone to call Montreal’s mayor, Jean Drapeau. The call was made possible by Ted Rogers, the founder of Rogers, who invested early in the mobile technology. Today, Rogers touted the history of that phone call, the first cellphone call in the country.
The phone used by Rogers for that historic first call was a bulky ‘transportable’ analog cell phone—a hand-held Motorola unit connected to a briefcase-sized battery pack, weighing around 10 pounds total (imagine stuffing that into your skinny jeans today).
Rogers was a minority investor in Cantel (originally known as Canadian Cellular Communications; a group of investors that bid on a federal cellular license) but later gained increasing ownership of the company. Cantel rebranded to Cantel AT&T as part of a partnership with the U.S. carrier. Then in 2001, Rogers fully acquired the company by buying out AT&T’s stake, turning it into Rogers Wireless in 2003.
At the time, mobile networks carried about 100 calls a day using 1G networks. Today, Canadians make 100 million calls daily and use 6.5 billion megabytes of data each day on Rogers’ network, says the company.
The wireless industry has evolved significantly since that first call. Each generation of technology—1G to 5G—brought new features like texting, email, internet browsing, and faster data speeds. Rogers says it has invested $45 billion over four decades to build out its network.
We can thank Steve Jobs and Apple’s iPhone for fast-tracking the need for bigger, better and faster wireless networks around the globe.
The company released a video to mark the anniversary and also noted it is celebrating its 65th year in business. Ted Rogers founded the company in 1960 after buying Toronto radio station CHFI. Check out the video below:
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Which city was Art Eggleton Mayor of?
Which city was Art Eggleton Mayor of?
It may have been the first call on what we now refer to as the mobile network, but it was not the first "wireless" call by any stretch of the imagineation. We had Autotel in BC, and Aurora in Alberta and parts of northestern BC before this and prior to these systems where you could make a fully automated call, there were IMTS systems using 12 and 24 vchannel setups. an announcement like this is similar to someone making a call on a touch tone phone in the 60's and claming it was the first phone call.