Nortel
PCS 1911

The PCS 1911 was Nortel's first entry into the wireless handset market in North America. It was announced at the PCS '96 trade show in San Francisco, USA and was described by Ian Sugarbroad, vice president, market development, Advanced Wireless Telephones, Nortel as “uniquely stylish and user friendly”. The phone was designed to be an easy-to-use handset and was influenced by extensive research that determined the advanced features that consumers wanted, such as a large screen to read messages. It had a four-line, backlit display which clearly displayed SMS text messages. The handset also featured a Nortel’s patented acoustic design in the ear cup and microphone to improve sound quality for consumers using the phone. Additionally, it supported caller ID technology (now a default feature on all mobile phones) allowing users to see who was calling before answering the call. If the consumer did not wish to answer, the call could be forwarded to voice mail. BellSouth Mobility awarded Nortel a multi-million dollar, three year supply agreement to deploy the PCS 1911 handset for sale to its customers in the North and South Carolina and Eastern Tennessee. This device in the Mobile Phone Museum collection is a rare VoiceStream-branded yellow variant of the Nortel PCS 1911 mobile phone. We also have alternative case designs in blue and burgundy colours. VoiceStream was an American wireless carrier that was founded in 1991 and eventually merged with Deutsche Telekom AG in 2001 to form T-Mobile US. Nortel had won a contract to supply VoiceStream with GSM infrastructure equipment in the 1990s so it was logical that it wanted to supply its handsets too. This phone was one-off mock-up design as part of a marketing initiative to showcase what Nortel’s handsets could have looked like if VoiceStream purchased them.