2. From Car Phone to Executive Brick

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Stephen Fry continues to trace the evolution of the mobile phone. Now he meets the men who brought mobile phones to Britain. Thanks to Margaret Thatcher opening up the airwaves, Britain became a world leader in mobile phone technology in the 1980s. Vodafone (short for voice-data-phone) competed fiercely with the BT's mobile baby, Cellnet (short for cellular network), to create the first mobile phone network in the UK, launched to great fanfare on Christmas Day 1985. Coverage was truly patchy, handsets were seriously hefty and calls cost a fortune, but mobile phones quickly replaced car phones as the ultimate yuppie accessory. Voicemail, incidentally, was a good excuse to charge customers yet more for a service that was, in reality, rather poor. Producer: Anna Buckley First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2011.