Radiolinja was a Finnish GSM operator founded on September 19, 1988. On March 27, 1991, the world's first GSM phone call was made in Radiolinja's network. The network was opened for commercial use on July 1, 1991.
When Radiolinja launched, Finland's incumbent mobile operator, Telecom Finland (later changed to Sonera, now part of Swedish TeliaSonera) operated a first generation mobile network on the NMT technology. Thus Radiolinja's launch was also the start of mobile telecoms competition in Europe. Several global firsts happened on the Radiolinja network, including the world's first person-to-person SMS text message, sent in 1993; the world's first fixed-mobile service bundle, launched in 1996; and the world's first paid downloadable mobile content, a ringtone, in 1998.
Radiolinja's original investors included a broad scale of Finnish corporations and local telephone companies that were known collectively as the Finnet Group. In the mid 90s Elisa (known then as Helsinki Telephone Company) started acquiring more and more of Radiolinja's stock which ultimately lead to merger of Radiolinja, Radiolinja Origo and Elisa. At this point Elisa had also acquired some other major stake holders of Radiolinja such as Soon Communications (earlier Tampere Telephone Plc and even earlier Tampere Telephone Co-operative).
Currently the operator is known as Elisa.
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