On February 17, 1996 the newspaper Italia Oggi headlined: “Tim invents the prepaid card”. It was, said the article, “a card that must be inserted in the mobile phone and equipped with a microchip that contains all the data of the customer, who is already active for conversations with the GSM mobile phone in Italy”. It cost 100,000 lire, including commercial costs and a traffic availability of 50,000 lire. It was the first rechargeable phone card. It was a turning point for the spread of mobile telephony.
Behind this innovation was a passionate and visionary manager: Mauro Sentinelli, who recently passed away. He was born in Rome in 1947 and graduated in electronic engineering in Rome, specializing in telecommunications in Turin and then in France and the United States. In 1974 he joined Sip which later became Telecom Italia, a company he left in 2005 after having been general manager (later he will also be a board member). He was one of the founders of the GSM communications standard, but he is especially remembered for the innovation of the prepaid card which gave a great impetus to the spread of mobile phones. He received many awards when he was alive and after his death TIM decided to dedicate the meeting room to him. When he died, on May 15, 2020, Federico De Rosa in the Corriere wrote: “Sentinelli’s contribution to the spread of mobile telephony in Italy was fundamental. In the 90s Italy was first in the world for the number of mobile phones and in 1993 Tim reached the first million subscribers. From then on, growth will be unstoppable and it will be accelerated above all by the launch of the TimCard, the first rechargeable telephone subscription in the world, invented by Sentinelli at the time the manager of Tim led by Vito Gamberale ”.
A few weeks ago on LinkedIn Ernesto Ciorra, who leads innovation at Enel and who had met Sentinelli in the field, dedicated a passionate memory to him: “Today Mauro Sentinelli would have turned 75. He is not a name known to the masses, but he should be, because this man did for mobile telephony what Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did for information technology. Mauro Sentinelli was one of the greatest innovators in the history of our country: father of the rechargeable prepaid and of the massive diffusion of mobile telephony itself, of satellite systems applied to devices, father of the GSM standard (still used today!), He had sensed the possibilities to profile customers to carry out 1to1 marketing before Rogers and Pepper, who wrote about it years later, had ‘seen’ the world of mobile telephony VAS even before the mobile telephony market itself was born, invented the first tariffs to make the mobile telephony at all, taking it out of the golden limbo of the few rich people who used it! When he told investors in the 1990s that mobile telephony would make it like drug trafficking and ‘the ladies’, they were stunned and surprised, also because the most noble American consulting firms claimed that the sector would remain in a ghetto, that the very few would have used his cell phone, and that he was a crazy visionary … He was also an innovator in financial communication: passionate, direct, straightforward, combining innovative visions and rigor of the numbers that would happen and that almost no one ‘saw’ like him. His staff prepared the slides, a young analyst scrolled through them during her shows and he filled them with unscheduled anecdotes and metaphors, in English with a Roman accent, turning numbers into stories, legends, glimpses of the future, like a time machine narrating. An heir to him in this is Elon Musk. After launching TIM and mobile telephony, he gave up everything and went to the USA becoming Vice President of Iridium, because he had ‘seen’ the cars that drive themselves, georeferenced, the devices that locate and support daily life, the satellites at low cost that make communications accessible everywhere (today at $ 99 / month you connect devices in remote areas with excellent latency and bandwidth, with mini satellites as a service).