!!!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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.


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