The only early network that was across "lots of different countries" was the NMT system and that was in the Scandinavian countries, which have always been their

The only early network that was across "lots of different countries" was the NMT system and that was in the Scandinavian countries, which have always been their own special sort of group of countries. I don't recall a company in Berlin building out networks in Greece, but that's the equivalent of what McCaw Cellular was doing in the late 80s/early 90s