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technology from Sweden’s telecommunications giant Ericsson. When Neale and his team first opened the boxes of components, they were puzzled. Nobody could figure out what it was. And the big fat manual, more than a thousand pages, was in Swedish. What Rogers had purchased was a collection of wires and parts for a wireless data network called Mobitex. It was acquired to fix a persistent service issue: in an era before cellphones were ubiquitous, Rogers couldn’t communicate with its service trucks. Customers wasted whole days waiting for servicemen, and Rogers lost money with idled trucks. If Rogers could figure out how to make a usable network with the Swedish equipment, it could manage its service fleet more effectively, improve customer satisfaction, and cut costs. Maybe Rogers could even sell Mobitex systems to other businesses.
    Barnstijn, a Dutchman, knew enough Swedish to translate some of the Mobitex manual. What Rogers had acquired, he explained, was a network designed to deploy data over radio frequencies. It was the kind of technology bridge Lazaridis’s teacher John Micsinszki had envisioned: a radio-based system that enabled communications on a network of computers and mobile devices. Lazaridis felt his pulse quicken. “I remembered what my teacher said, that the person who puts this all together is going to do something really big,” he says.
    For his part, Neale didn’t have much faith that Mobitex would be commerciallyviable. All he saw was an electrical mess. “If you can figure out how this works, we’ll hire you,” he told his guests.
    Communication advances have marched at a sluggish pace for most of history. By the early 1800s progress was so limited that carrier pigeons and flag semaphores defined instant messaging. Things picked up speed in the mid-1800s with the advent of the telegraph. The rapid transmission of electrical messages over copper wires triggered such an explosion in communications that the breakthrough has been referred to as the Victorian Internet. 1 Just as the modern Internet boom inspired legions of start-ups seeking to leapfrog dot-com innovations, the dots and dashes of Morse code telegraph messages inspired competitors to race ahead with advances.
    One of the most famous early pioneers was Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor who devised a system for “telegraphy without wires.” Dispensing with the wires and cables of the telegraph, Marconi devised a system that harnessed radio waves to transmit messages. Other scientists had previously experimented with transmitters to generate radio signals over short distances. But what these innovators lacked was Marconi’s imagination and showmanship. He made headlines around the world in 1901 when his towering transmitter in Cornwall, England, successfully conveyed the world’s first transatlantic radio message, three clicks, or Morse dots, for the letter S, to a receiving station Marconi was manning in Newfoundland.
    Marconi’s show business savvy allowed him to raise enough money to build a profitable global business for customers with deep pockets. Sales improved when it was revealed a Marconi operator went down with the
Titanic
after successfully sending an SOS to nearby ships. Naval and commercial ships, unreachable by telegraph wires, paid handsomely for Marconi’s wireless equipment. But for the average company, his systems were too complex and expensive. Most consumers and businesses would have to wait nearly a century for more affordable wireless communication machines. In the meantime, innovation was driven by those willing to pay heavily for the convenience of portable communicators.
    Ericsson designed what is believed to be the first car phone in the early 1900s for its wandering chief, Axel Boström. Boström was such a car enthusiast that his trips down Swedish country roads in rudimentary cars oftenleft him stranded with a broken vehicle. The company assigned engineers to design a mobile phone so he could call