ABSTRACT
Mobiles phones-or cellular phones as they are called in some parts of the world-have received an exceptionally warm welcome. This new device has in less than a decade gone from being a rare extravagance for the yuppies of the 1980s to everyday capital goods of ordinary people. Thus, for example, by the mid-1990s roughly every third household in the Nordic countries had at least one mobile phone. The popularity of this product is not surprising. It enables the user to avoid the rigidity of fixed appointments, making last minute changes possible. It makes the difficulty of remembering everything on the shopping list a problem of the past. It has increased the reachability of family members and businesses alike. The sky-rocketing of sales has, of course, been boosted by the fact that mobile phone network operators during extended periods have been subsidising the handsets by several hundred US dollars, and prices for network services have steadily gone down.
