Vodacom is celebrating the first mobile call made over parent company Vodafone's network.
The network, SA's largest with more than 30 million customers, says 1 January marked the first call, which was made just before midnight on New Year's Eve, by Michael Harrison. Harrison apparently slipped away from his family's party at home, was driven to Parliament Square, and made the country's first mobile call.
Yet, according to AT&T, the first mobile call was made on 17 June 1946 when a US driver "pulled out a handset from under his car's dashboard, placed a phone call and made history. It was the first mobile telephone call."
The US-based network says a team including Alton Dickieson and D Mitchell from Bell Labs, and future AT&T CEO HI Romnes, worked for more than a decade to achieve this feat. AT&T was granted a commercial cellular licence in 1982, the same year Vodafone won its licence.
In the UK, what was then known as Racal Electronics launched Racal Vodafone in 1984, with services scheduled to begin the following year. According to the BBC, Vodafone was one of two entities awarded cellular licences, and raced to beat Cellnet to get up and running first.
Harrison made the UK's first call to his father, Sir Ernest Harrison, the chairman of Racal Vodafone.
Vodacom adds the first mobile handset available for its parent company's network, a Vodafone VT1 Transportable, was originally sold for £1 650 - equivalent to R75 000 today with inflation. This phone took 10 hours to charge, and only gave 30 minutes of talk time.
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