25 Years Ago, the First Mobile Phone Call Was Made in India, Costing Over Rs 8/Minute

The call made in July 1995, between the Writer’s Building in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Sanchar Bhavan in New Delhi, was carried over this Modi Telstra’s MobileNet service. That cellular call inaugurated MobileNet services in Calcutta. The company was one of the eight companies licensed to provide cellular services in India. Two licences were awarded each for the four metropolitan cities.

Interestingly, reports state that back then, the initial phone call rates ranged from Rs 8.4 per minute for both outgoing and incoming calls, and in peak mobile phone traffic hours, the cost also went up to Rs 16.8 per minute. For the Modi-Telstra JV network operator, which later became Spice, simply establishing the network itself was a massive cost even after they estimated that their services would reach at least 10 lakh people in the near future, soon after premiering in 1995.

The phones themselves weren’t affordable, either – they would cost upward of Rs 40,000, which after adding 25 years of inflation, is worth over Rs 2 lakh in today’s valuation. While it is not known exactly which mobile phones were used in India’s first ever mobile phone call, they may have been something like the security-focused Nokia 2080, or the mainstream oriented Nokia 350, or for that time, the cutting edge Nokia 880 sleek and rugged mobile phone. It had cutting edge features such as a snap-on, vibrating battery to give you silent call alerts, the ability to read three lines of text at one time to read the then-latest SMS service, and a ‘user friendly keypad’.

Telecommunications in India has come a long way since 1995. Today, just in the wireless mobile telephony market, India has around 450 million users of ‘feature phones’ – a term for non-internet-enabled mobile phones, and close to 400 million users of ‘smartphones’ – swanky sheets of glass that puts the world at your feet. Our telephony costs are next to a fraction of what it was back then – calling comes for free, while data costs less than Rs 4 per gigabyte.