He is considered to be one of the most important developers in modern times together with Laila Ohlgren, both engineers at Telia.
Later they developed GSM and led the meetings to find a European and later world standard for mobile communication.
He started his professional career in 1961 at Televerket (now merged with TeliaSonera), the Swedish Telecommunications Administration, where he developed the first expansion compressor for high-quality sound.
In the early 1970s, he was accepted as a PhD student at KTH, with Tele Transmission theory as a major and a minor in mathematics.
[6] Mäkitalo was the part of the group that developed the world's first countrywide paging system with the possibility of sending messages.