From bulky car phones to pocket computers, cellphones mark 40 years in Canada

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MONTREAL — Pierre Robitaille remembers feeling embarrassed in 1985 when he made his cellphone calls from a bulky device that came with its own carrying case.

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Now 86 years old, Robitaille was one of the first people in Canada to sign up for a wireless plan when they became available 40 years ago, on July 1, 1985.

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As an electrician, Robitaille wanted a way to keep in touch with colleagues and clients while on the road at various construction sites. First came a car phone, then came the early hand-held versions, which included a mobile device and a suitcase in which to carry it.

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“It wasn’t very heavy but it was embarrassing, it was big,” Robitaille said of the mid-80s cellphone, in an interview from his home in the western Quebec town of St-Andre-Avellin.

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The first wireless call in Canadian history took place 40 years ago on July 1, 1985, when then-Toronto mayor Art Eggleton used a 10-pound mobile phone to call his Montreal counterpart, Jean Drapeau.

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Telecommunications company Rogers says that in the first month, mobile networks in Canada handled 100 calls per day. Today, that number has risen to 100 million calls, as well as 6.5 billion megabytes of data on the Rogers network alone.

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Oakville, Ont., resident Peter Kent was another early mobile phone adopter — though the initiative came from his boss rather than himself. His car phone had to be installed professionally and cost around $3,500, he recalled in a recent interview.

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At first, he was unsure if he should be thankful for the new connectivity. “I said, ‘why are we doing this?’ And then (my boss) said, ‘well, when I want you, I want you.”‘

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Kent, however, soon started to enjoy his new phone. He recalls driving with his wife to his mother-in-law’s home and making a call from her driveway.

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“She said, ‘where are you?’ And I said, I’m in your driveway,” Kent recalled. “She couldn’t believe it. She ran to the door with her cordless phone and she could see me talking in the car.”

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Eric Smith, the senior vice-president for the Canadian Telecommunications Association, said the early commercial cellular services were limited to voice calling in select urban areas and involved “very large, bulky devices” with limited battery time. Users were charged by the minute.

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“If you flash forward 40 years, people really have more than just the capability of calling, and they have a kind of a computer in their pocket,” he said. Today, some 99 per cent of areas where people live and work in Canada have some form of mobile coverage, he said.

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Smith said that initially, there was skepticism about whether cellular service would be widely embraced.

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“It required a large investment by companies in a country that’s very large geographically with a widely dispersed population,” he said. “And some people thought that the companies who were investing in this were taking a very big risk.”