Ericsson W25 fixed cellular, and a look back
This sailor wouldn’t want to heel too far, or that monster mobile might slide and break his foot! I found this shot at Ericsson’s press site, where the box is identified as an MTD mobile phone from Svenska Radioaktiebolaget (or SRA, an Ericsson subsidiary), circa 1980. The technology has, um, evolved. What I was actually looking for was the new, and amazingly full-featured, Ericsson W25 fixed cellular. It can use either tri-band CDMA or quad-band GSM, including three fast data protocols, to connect most anywhere on earth to using whatever you can attach via two phone jacks, four Ethernet ports, and WiFi. It also features fax support, ac/dc flexibility, twin USB ports for “print server and/or mass storage”, and an external antenna option. I don’t know what it costs, and—according to Alan Spicer, where I found out about it—you can’t quite get one yet, but it certainly appears to fit into the supercellularistic heart-of-a-boat-network category.
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I have a military physician friend who lives in Honolulu, who was using a similar "luggable" radiotelephone while sailing off Waikiki every weekend in the mid 1980's. I vividly remember one Friday evening that saw him diagnosing and initiating treatment and transfer plans for a patient in the Marshall Islands with meningitis, all via his then-amazing phone, with Diamondhead in the background. I have the same capability now in my shirt pocket.