Telstra celebrates 30 years of mobile phone network

By Will Colvin IT may look big, but don't worry - it's "compact" enough to fit into the boot of your car. See Australia's first mobile.

IT'S so big you need a car to carry it around, and it looks more like a hairdryer than a communications device.

Yes, it's Australia's first ever mobile phone — and it's having a birthday.

Thirty years ago today, on August 9, 1981, the first phone call was made on Telstra's new Public Automatic Telephone System, the country's first mobile network.

The call was made on a car handset developed by Telstra — then known as Telecom — called simply The Mobile Phone.

 Watch the 1981 promotional video for The Mobile Phone above

The Mobile Phone included a 45cm handset, a transceiver stored in the boot of the car and an antenna on the roof. It weighed 14kg and cost $5000.

To use the phone, you had to turn one of 3 keys — labelled I, N and M — to operate the "control lock", setting it to different positions to accept incoming calls or make outgoing ones.

The Mobile Phone could store 16 numbers and alerted drivers of incoming calls by honking the horn and flashing the headlights.

The first commercially-available hand-held mobile, the DynaTAC 8000x, didn't appear in Australia until two years later, in 1983.

When the PAMTS network first became active, only 1000 people could use it at once and phone coverage was limited to three mobile base stations in the greater Melbourne area.

Another five base stations were launched in Sydney in December.

Today's Telstra network is powered by more than 7400 base stations across Australia and has more than 11 million users.