Frank, I was aware of France Telecom's Minitel offering of the early 80s when it was launched and followed it for some time, but not the German equivalent which you cited (videotext). Would you mind expanding on the latter offering for a moment, giving us a better historical perspective of what it consisted of?
Bildschirmtext (Btx) started in 1984 as a national data service with 1200/75 bps dial-up access, i.e. 1200 bps for receiving and 75 bps for sending. This sounds funny today but was state-of-the-art then when many people still used an acoustic coupler (300 bps). There was a central IBM host in Ulm. The display was character-based with few graphics though it was possible to create small pictures by redefining the bit map of a reserved character subset. Btx never became as popular as Minitel which owed its wide adoption to the public subsidy of terminals. But nevertheless Btx subscriber numbers increased over the years. When the success of TCP/IP became obvious Deutsche Telekom introduced PPP dial-in with a gateway to the old network thus maintaining backward compatibility while adding WWW and using the existing Btx customer base as a core for Internet subscribers. Some of the Btx offers are still useful; pages designed for 1200 bps just fly with 64 kbps (ISDN) and are faster than most Web sites with broadband access. Frequent traders who are customers of the most popular German online broker, consors.de, prefer the Btx site as the fastest of all access methods.
Getting back on point, would you argue that the PTTs themselves have "gotten it" for a long time, if we must use that idiom?
I don't know non-German PTTs well enough to comment on them but I have followed Deutsche Telekom (NYSE:DT). Some points:
- Increase in ISDN customers from 1993: 0.3 to 1999: 13.3 million
- Increase in wireless customers from 1995: 1.8 to 1999: 9.1 million (partial float of cellular unit T-Mobil planned later this year)
- Increase in Internet customers from 1995: 0.8 to 1999: 4.2 million. T-Online is Europe's leading ISP far ahead of AOL (partial float also this year)
The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition January 26, 2000
Deutsche Telekom Plans IPO In Lift for Europe's Tech Market
This dot-com is going to make waves.
interactive.wsj.com
- Roll-out of DSL broadband access in cities
- About 100,000 miles of fiber at the end of 1997
- Decrease of workforce from 1994: 231,000 to 1999: 172,900
- Decline of long-distance phone charges by up to 90%
- Decrease of long-term debt in the last four years by about $30 billion
- Share price increase from 14 euro in 11/96 (IPO) to about 75 euro currently
DT's weakest aspect is the international strategy. Global One, the joint venture with Sprint and France T‚l‚com, was a disaster:
Global One joint venture collapses
By John Borland, Staff Writer, CNET News.com
January 26, 2000, 4:00 p.m. PT
news.cnet.com
There are persistent rumors about potential acquisitions/mergers, SBC and Cable & Wireless being frequently named candidates. But so far nothing has materialized. This article has been published 15 minutes ago:
Deutsche Telekom now Europe's most valuable firm
Wednesday February 2, 1:01 pm Eastern Time
biz.yahoo.com
So while DT isn't as lean and mean as an optical start-up it has improved considerably and is a useful case study how important a good regulatory framework is and what kind of dynamics are set free by a liberalized market and competition.
Regards,
Jochen |
