Spain’s end of the pan-European Groupe Speciale Mobile digital cellular service looks as if it is in trouble. Although the service was tested at the Barcelona Olympics and the Seville Expo, El Pais predicts that it is unlikely to be up and running until at least 1995. The situation hasn’t been helped by the shortfall in subscribers to Telefonica de Espana SA’s Automatic Mobile Telephony, TMA, service. The firm had hoped to have some 215,000 subscribers by the year-end, but looked more likely to end up with 190,000. To add to Telefonica’s problems, proposals have been made to set up a radio-paging system. This will break the group’s monopoly on mobile radio communications: licences are to be offered to other operators. The next stage will come when competition opens for radio trunking, followed by automatic mobile radio-telephony.
