France Telecom is convinced that it is now in a position to dominate Europe with its Minitel viewdata service. Its aim is to be providing 350,000 hours of international traffic by 1992. The company’s confidence that it is poised to expand its services across the continent follows the announcement that Teletel, the French equivalent of the UK Prestel viewdata network, will soon interconnect with the networks of Switzerland and Spain, coupled with the purchase of a 30% stake in Minitel Communications Ltd – a company formed in December to exploit the Irish telecommunications network. The interconnection with Switzerland, to be effective from June, should enable the country to reinforce its internal network, which currently has under 60,000 subscribers – mainly corporate customers.
Ireland
Connection with Spain, expected to be achieved later in the year, will make up for a bad start when the Spanish insisted on retaining Ibernet, the Iberian equivalent of the German Bildschirmtext system as its standard. General director of Minitel Communications Ltd John Fitzpatrick is aiming towards installing 10,000 terminals – manufactured by Alcatel and Philips – in Ireland by the end of the year, growing to 30,000 over the two subsequent years. One terminal costs the equivalent of $400 with the option to lease for $8 per month. In the immediate future, 31 services will be available – compared with 15,000 in France – and the others will be added later on. Fitzpatrick assures that while his company will be focusing on the services that will appeal to business customers, consumer services are still a priority. Meanwhile, Intelmatique, the subsidiary of France Telecom responsible for exporting the Minitel concept, is geared up to increasing its international traffic. Starting from nothing in 1987, the company saw a growth from 10,000 international traffic hours in 1988 to 30,000 hours in 1989 and 143,200 hours in 1990. According to 01 Informatique, the foreign network is expected to be profitable by the beginning of next year, but only if the amount of traffic reaches 350,000 hours. According to Francois Olibet, general director of Intelmatique, the obstacles facing Minitel’s export, routed in the access code and the standard Teletel, are as numerous in Europe as in the US. On the continent, Germany has developed its own standard which incompatible with the French standard, as are the two countries’ network access protocols. Although French-German interconnection has been made possible, the problems of translating code are still very real, so suppliers aren’t making too much effort to adapt their services for Germany. Says Jean Alessandri, director of Servotel, a small supplier of servers to the US, Canada and Italy, the German standard presents a real barrier – for a supplier to be successful, it has to offer a multistandard product and then convince his foreign partners that Teletel is the superior standard. If Teletel and France Telecom succeed in imposing their standard, it will make things a lot easier. According to Claude Sanchez, commercial director of export at Alcatel, the difficulties of exporting to Germany and the UK aren’t so much a battle of standards as a lack of carriers. Even so, France Telecom reckons it is poised for conquest of the European viewdata market Italy accounts for 54% of its international traffic and, says the French company, is in the process of replacing its Prestel kit with Teletel.
