Minitel!!! I remembered! Minitel - Wikipedia
And let’s savour this line: “Minitel was joint development between France Télécom and British Telecom (prior to its privatisation)”
I wouldn’t discount that reasoning out-of-hand, though. In Hungary, at least, there were many, many people who bought cell phones in lieu of land-line phones, especially out in the sticks, where it cost more to have Matav (Hungarian telecom) come out there and install a line, than to simply go and buy a pay-as-you-go mobile phone or a subscription.
Europe was where I became used to people not having land lines. Here in the US, everybody I know (except for myself, unless you count the Skype line) has one.
OK, fair point, I was dismissing it out-of-hand for those of use who’ve never worried about our landline service 
(On another level, I recall a Radio 4 documentary some time back, which described Kabul as the most advanced city for mobile telephony…because nobody had ever been able to put in a decent landline system, they were just going for mobiles instead. And a cellular system is a fucker for anyone trying to take over a city by stealth…)
Forgive me for saying, but in the late 1980s, I wouldn’t yet have counted Hungary in “the west”.
Also, and this is purely out of interest and not disagreement: was it cheaper for a cellphone company to install a mast rather than a landline to be laid? Or was it more a case of turgid state monopoly vs. sprightly modern capitalists?
Bell Canada tried to bring out a version of Minitel called Alex in the late eighties, but it got sideswiped by inexpensive personal computers connected by modem to BBSes.
I’m speaking late 1990s here. When I moved to Hungary in '98 I honest to God saw more cell phones there than in Chicago at the same time. Part of it was in the United States, you had a pretty healthy pager culture. I knew lots of people – teenagers, students, business men-- who had pagers but not cell phones. Hungary kind of skipped over the whole pager thing and went straight to cell phones.
The latter, I would say. I know we did an article on it while I worked at the Budapest Business Journal, but they don’t seem to have online archive only lets you access back to 2005. This story would have been 1998 or 1999.
Do you have any evidence for this assertion? The landlines in Australia (well in the cities and main towns, which is 90% of the population) worked perfectly fine, but nevertheless mobile phones have been taken up extremely rapidly.
Australia is nearly the same size as the US with less than one tenth the population, yet has superior mobile phone service and coverage.
IMO the problem was like TV in the US and military mechanisation in Italy; being first with the technology means you are stuck with the first stab at it, second try is almost always better.
I just read your link and learned that the service will be discontinued at the end of this year 
I must admit that I didn’t use it in eons, despite still having (I think) an emulator somewhere on my PC, but still… I spent…hours, days, nights, months (and plenty of money) using it, on RPG sites, on “chats”, etc… 
There I met my second and third girlfriends . Hi, Stef’ and Caro’ 
And they’re removing life support. I feel all nostalgic, now . And it’s your fault!!! :mad: :mad:
I don’t know about countries like Hungary that certainly had an extensive telephone network, but in African countries where such infrastructure might be lacking outside cities, cellphone infrastructure is seemingly much cheaper, so they’re currently going right to cellphones without passing by the landlines step.
Is it still good in the middle of nowhere?
You mean where there are no people? How would I know? Why would it matter?
Actually, I think the Minitel system in France is a good example of what I was trying to illustrate. Yes, Minitel was originally ahead of the rest of the world, but it didn’t take long before general purpose computers did what the Minitel did, better and cheaper, yet french users were stuck with Minitel since the infrastructure was already in place. Had they not had Minitel, newer concepts might have taken hold quicker.
No, I don’t have a cite for this, and I have never lived in France, so I could be wrong.
In spite of this being GQ, no, I don’t have a cite for this, either. (Why is this in GQ anyway? Is there are hard and fast answer?) And if that is the case as Askance says, Australia would not fit the model I was proposing.
I was thinking more of third world countries where I have heard that celphones have quickly become more popular than in USA, leapfrogging over landlines which have been government monopolies notorious for poor service.
Japan might not fit the model, either, but the reason for rapid celphone adoption could be different in different societies. I think of Japanese kids as both having disposable income and being gadget-happy.
Because if Australia only has good coverage in the cities, that’s not any better than the US.
But if that coverage is enough to make the market grow as it has in Australia, then the coverage issue isn’t an explanation for the relative lack of interest in America.
How did you determine that? What were the metrics, and how did the two countries score on those metrics?
Digital cellular services do not interoperate with each other if they use different/competing standards.
In Europe and a good portion of the world the standard is GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication.) Roughly 75% of the world’s 2 billion cell phones are GSM, most of China uses GSM, and China is the world’s largest cell phone market. GSM’s strength is its international roaming capability. Users have seamless same-number roaming in over 170 countries. Most GSM systems outside North America operate in the 900-MHz and 1.8 GHz frequency bands (1.9 GHz in the USA.)
In the U.S. GSM is not standard because the FCC permitted open competition in cell phone technology, resulting in multiple incompatible standards. This situation limits roaming and contributes to the high prices of U.S. cell phones.
There are GSM phone systems in the United States (T-Mobile, VoiceStream, and Cingular.) However the major standard here is CDMA (at least it used to be, it may not be anymore.)
CDMA transmits over several frequencies, occupies the entire spectrum, and randomly assigns users a range of frequencies over time. In general CDMA is cheaper to implement, is more efficient use of spectrum, and provides higher quality throughput of voice and data than GSM. Because of its inherent efficiency, implementing CDMA and a standard called wide-band CDMA (WCDMA) is the long term objective even of existing GSM systems (the TDMA signaling system used in GSM is inferior to CDMA.) CDMA2000 is a competing standard.
I guess I forgot to answer the question.
Basically, because of the open competition between standards that the FCC allowed, early cell phone implementation was slower and prices were higher. I believe most of the problems with slow implementation (and thus coverage) trace back to this. Cell phone companies are less likely to expand to new markets when they grow slower because of slower adoption by the public, and the slower adoption by the public is because cell phones were more expensive in the United States than in Europe.
However, we may not be that far behind technologically, some of our systems are actually ahead a step because they are using the superior CDMA standard as opposed to the inferior standard used by GSM.
Lack of coverage and being behind in cell phone technology are two separate issues. The smaller coverage is because as I said, it has taken longer for the technology to take hold here.
Also, there is a problem of dispersion. As Askance mentions, no one in Australia cares if certain parts of the country do not get service because no one lives there. The raw numbers on population density suggest Australia is a very sparsely populated country. That is using very simplistic metrics. A more adequate metric would be to measure the population density of the average community in which Australians live; there would be methods for finding this out but it would require crunching numbers and census data. Ultimately I’m going to make the somewhat educated guess that Australia’s population is not “truly” as sparse or as dispersed as that of the United States. But rather, the population is concentrated in multiple higher population areas.
In the United States east of the Mississippi there is virtually no area where “no one lives.” The landscape is dotted by many, many, many small towns and communities.
According to the 2000 Census, 222,360,539 out of 281,421,906 live in an urbanized area. That’s 79%. However, only 30,036,715 live in urbanized clusters, which is what most of us think of when we talk about areas of very high urbanization (city centers.)
The other 192m “urbanized” Americans live in census areas with populations that range from 2500+. The census only defines an area as rural if it has a population of under 2,500. And of communities with under 2500 59m Americans reside, which is a population much higher than that of Australia, and nearly that of the UK.
So we have 59m Americans who live in “rural” areas, only 30m who live in “urban clusters” and then 192m who live in areas that can be anywhere in between (meaning Pittsburgh to King of Prussia, PA.) These communities are dispersed over a huge area, with varying degrees of saturation. In southwest and western Virginia (areas I’m familiar with) you have a good number of people, many of them however live in small communities or counties that as a whole don’t really have too many people in them as compared to some of the other areas in Virginia. Look at the area near Blacksburg, Virginia. Rolling hills and mountains with sparse population is the norm when traveling through the area, there are some small towns, then you get to Blacksburg which is a much larger town. There are a lot of semi-small/medium sized towns sort of scattered around the United States like that, and it can be hard to set up a cell phone tower to cover all of them.
Except for Alaska and a few areas in the “west” (areas in the Rockies and etc.) there really isn’t a meaningful swathe of space where you can point and say, “no one lives there.” We have people living almost everywhere and thus to get cell phone coverage that covers almost everyone you’d have to have towers that cover virtually the entire geographic area of the country outside of Alaska.
I seriously doubt that is the case for Australia.
In Australia weren’t they charged for every call made and received on their land line? I’m to recall that being the way it worked when I was there in 97. Whereas in the US all my local calls were free (other then a monthly fee) and all received calls were free, unless they were collect calls and I accepted them. That would seem like good motivation to move to a single fee plan.