Telekommunikation#

Telecommunications, forms of communication, by wire or wireless, between two or more parties over a distance, based on electrotechnical insights obtained since the 19th century. Austria played a pioneering role in telegraphy and telephony. The first Austrian telegraph line (from the Northern Railway Station in Vienna to Floridsdorf) was built by A. v. Baumgartner in 1845, while the first long-distance line on the European continent (Vienna-Brno-Prague) was opened in 1847. In 1852 telegraph offices were integrated into the postal system. The telephone service, first introduced in Vienna in 1881 with 154 subscribers (followed by Graz in 1882 and Linz in 1885), was considerably expanded in 1886 by establishment of the long-distance line between Vienna and Brno (Bruenn). The service was nationalised in 1895.

Telephony remained part of the public administration for approximately 100 years. Over this period, a nation-wide telephone network was gradually developed (1998: appr. 4.2 million subscribers); in the 1990s the mobile phone rapidly gained ground. The public administration divested itself of Post und Telekom Austria AG (PTA) in 1996; the first competitor in the field of mobile telephony appeared on the market in the same year; in 1998 the telecommunications operations of PTA were organised as a subsidiary Telekom Austria AG; in the same year a further mobile phone network started operating and wire telephony was opened to new providers. When PTA was founded, jurisdiction over matters of telecommunications was vested in Telecom Control Ges. m. b. H.

Digitalisation of the telephone network, a modernisation operation of primordial importance, was started in 1985 and completed in 2000. The ISDN digital telephone network is capable of transporting very high data volumes (1998: 152.000 basic and 4000 multiple subscribers). In the field of mobile telephony Austria ranks near the top of European countries (2000: 4.2 million subscribers). By 1998 the number of Internet users in Austria had already exceeded the 1 million mark.

Since 1965 Austria has participated in an international system of Communications Satellites which transmits telephone calls to America and other regions of the world. Of the total of 244 countries that can be reached by phone, 231 participate in fully automatic self-dialling operations.

On account of the advantages offered by the telefax system (available since 1981) the number of telex subscribers has dropped rapidly (1993: 10.003 subscribers, 1995: 5390, 1998: 1203), and the use of telegraph messages has also declined.