History of telephony in Austria
The history of telephony in Austria describes the introduction of telephony and its further development from its beginnings to the present day in relation to Austria .
Fixed line telephony
First contacts
In 1863, the German physicist and inventor Philipp Reis demonstrated to the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I in Frankfurt am Main a device for transmitting tones and melodies.
On February 14, 1876, the Scottish speech therapist Alexander Graham Bell , who lives in Boston, applied for a patent for a "speech telegraph". This "Bell's speaking telegraph" was one of the attractions of the Great Exhibition of Philadelphia . On October 9, 1876, the world's first long-distance call was made on a two English mile long Boston – Cambridge (USA) telephone line. The sketches about Bell's experiments published in the Leipzig “Illustrirten Zeitung” on June 30, 1877 prompted Franz Nissl to construct a telephone, the function of which he demonstrated to the professors' group on December 22, 1877, together with two university assistants in the Physics Institute of the Vienna Technical University. In 1884 Nissl founded the "Telephon- und Telegraphenfabrik Czeija, Nissl & Co." together with Karl August Czeija , which played a major role in the development of the Austrian telephone network. 1877 also presented the Innsbruck Professor Pfaundler the Natural History Society in Innsbruck a demonstration of the "Bell's speaking telegraph".
Start of use
By decree of June 3, 1881, the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Commerce issued the first concession for the operation of telephone systems within a 15 km radius around St. Stephen's Cathedral, intended to be the center of the Viennese private telephone company.
The first telephone exchange was located in the first district at Friedrichstrasse 6 and was put into operation on December 1, 1881 with 154 participants. The conversations were mediated by the “ Miss from Office ”, who had to connect the callers to the desired partner by correctly inserting metal plugs on their belts. If a participant wanted to have a conversation, he first had to attract the operator's attention. At first this was done by a pipe hanging next to the telephone. The participants whistled into the mouthpiece and in the exchange, the lady from the office entered the line as soon as she heard the acoustic signal. But the devices were soon equipped with so-called crank inductors. With these devices, a ringing voltage was generated which visually and acoustically signaled in the exchange that a certain subscriber wanted an operator to enter his connection line. As soon as the participant heard the operator's voice in his ear tube, he informed her of the desired interlocutor. At the end of the conversation, the participant had to operate the crank inductor again to signal the end of the conversation.
In 1882 there were already almost 1000 participants, as well as a public telephone on the premises of the Vienna Stock Exchange . A fixed fee had to be paid for the use of this intercom.
The English company “Consolidated Telephone Construction and Maintenance Comp. Limited "in London, later the" Telephone Company of Austria Limited ", acquired the right to set up and operate telephone networks in several cities in the Austrian half of the empire. Telephone operations in Graz , Prague and Trieste were started in 1882 and in Lemberg , Bielitz-Biala , Chernivtsi , Pilsen and Reichenberg in 1883 . The Viennese private telephone company, in turn, set up the first telephone network in Brno in 1884 . The cities of Linz and Urfahr , which were not yet united at the time, were also wired in Upper Austria , and from 1885 80 connected participants could telephone each other.
From private to state telephone
Despite the progressive expansion, Austria tended to be at the lower end of the scale on an international average. In the cities of Paris , Berlin or Rome there was one telephone subscriber for every 40 inhabitants at the end of 1885, in Vienna there was only one telephone subscriber for every 1050 inhabitants.
The Imperial and Royal Ministry of Commerce identified the cause as the fact that the private entrepreneurs granted concessions did not necessarily meet the wishes of the customers, were too expensive and used equipment that did not correspond to the state of the art and therefore could not cope with the constantly increasing volume of traffic. The state therefore wanted to take all telephone operations into its own hands from now on and began to buy back the licenses that had been granted. There were now a total of eleven private networks that wanted compensation for all of their switching equipment, devices, laid lines, office equipment, etc. The state administration also had to take over the staff of the private companies.
On January 1, 1895, the date when the last private network was handed over (the Vienna city network), the entire Austrian telephone network was in the possession of the state administration. The telephone network was now looked after by the Austrian Post and Telegraph Administration (ÖPTV). The underground cable network was 154 kilometers long, 35,493 m of which were connected. The trace length of the overground lines was 800 kilometers, the installed wire length was around 6000 kilometers of wire. 15,600 wall and bridge girders and 3,400 wooden pillars, to which around 280,000 porcelain bells were attached, were used to continue the wire lines above ground. At that time there were 334 telephone operators and 160 telephone workers employed.
Further expansion
The switchboard in Vienna's Friedrichstrasse soon no longer corresponded to the state of the art and was therefore abandoned in February 1899 and replaced by the newly built center in Dreihufeisengasse (today's Lehárgasse) designed for 12,000 connections. The headquarters on Börseplatz was also replaced in May 1899 by a newly built headquarters in Berggasse designed for 3,000 connections. To complement these two main centers, to which a total of 15,000 participants could be connected, so-called secondary centers were set up in Hietzing , Meidling , Floridsdorf , Simmering , Döbling and Ottakring . But even the two main centers had to be expanded to the full capacity of 24,000 participants after just a few years.
The number of participants rose rapidly. When it started in 1881, 154 participants were registered, ten years later there were already 11,095 and in 1901 34,651 subscribers took part in the service, which is now an indispensable part of business life.
The first company managements for two or four participants were set up in the headquarters in Meidling in 1905. The participants who were connected to one and the same line could call or be called without being able to disturb one another or overhear the other conversations. Initially, 40 such company lines were set up for testing, but soon the so-called “local battery company system” was in use throughout Vienna. This made it possible to offer a cheap connection to around 18,000 subscribers who had weak to moderate traffic.
In December 1906, the previously applicable, costly and complicated payment modalities for the installation, switching and calling fees were replaced by uniformly set tariffs, which led to the further popularization of the telephone in Austria.
The first payphone
The first “telephone machine” in Austria was put into operation on August 17, 1903 in Vienna's Südbahnhof . It was a "telephone station" which was available for an active conversation after throwing in 20 Heller.
More were soon to be found in the north and west train stations , in the Café Central and in the Prater-Hauptallee . The Viennese magistrate and the monument office initially wanted to prevent the installation of payphones in Vienna on the grounds that they spoil the cityscape. Only when the elegant-looking kiosks were designed to match the cityscape, approval was given for installation in suitable locations. The first kiosk was on Franzensring (today Universitätsring).
At the end of 1907, 44 public payphones were in use in Austria: 42 in Vienna and 2 in Tyrol at the Trient and Brixlegg train stations . Ten years later, 600 public payphones were in use in Vienna and 178 in the federal states.
Automation begins
The manual operation was not only very cumbersome, but also, above all, labor-intensive. The introduction of the automatic operation took place initially in Vienna in a small test center. It was opened to traffic in the telephone exchange in Berggasse on April 1, 1905 and was initially set up for 200 subscribers. When the results were satisfactory, a fully automatic control center for 2000 individual and 1200 company connections was put into operation in Graz in 1910. Other centers were automated.
With this system, the subscriber number was not dialed by a dial, but by a lever device built into the telephone. The desired number was set with levers on the telephone. The devices for Vienna had six-digit levers, the devices for Graz and Linz had four levers. The telephone number was set on the set using the control lever, then you picked up the receiver, pressed the call button and then turned the crank on the side. However, this "lever system" had the serious disadvantage that the length of the phone number was limited and the connection could only be released after the dialing had been completed. Furthermore, these devices were very expensive and also prone to failure. For this reason, telephones were given a rotary dial from 1928 onwards .
Remote connections
Right from the start of telephony, there were already interurban connections to the Austrian crown lands . However, until around 1920 these lines were routed over overhead lines without exception. This naturally resulted in disruptions due to storms, ice loads in winter, fallen trees, etc. The obvious solution, already practiced in local networks, of routing cable routes underground, was initially ruled out for long-distance cables , because such lines were only used because of attenuation could be called about 50 km away. It was not until the invention of the Serbian physicist Michael Pupin , who used self-induction coils ( Pupin coils ) at certain points in the long-distance cables to compensate for their electrical capacitance , which reduced the attenuation and a conversation distance of up to 200 km, made this possible. An even greater range only emerged when it was possible to re-energize the speech stream weakened by the great distance, i.e. to strengthen the speech stream. This was achieved with the amplifier tube developed by the Austrian inventor Robert von Lieben . Both inventions together now offered the possibility of overcoming any long distances using reliable and economical long-distance lines.
The first underground long-distance cable ran from Vienna via St. Pölten and Linz to Nuremberg . Already laid in 1916, it was not put into operation until 1926. This cable had 98 pairs of wires and was fitted with amplifiers for the first time at intervals of 75 km. These amplification facilities were set up in the so-called amplification offices. There the cables were connected, the lines were galvanically separated and routed to the tube amplifiers, amplified and then again, galvanically separated, routed to the next amplifier field length. Other long-distance cables soon led from Vienna to Budapest (1927), from Linz via Innsbruck to Switzerland (1928), from Innsbruck to Munich (1928), from Vienna via Lundenburg to Brno (1928), from Bruck an der Mur to Linz (1929) ) and from Bruck an der Mur via Klagenfurt and Villach to Italy (1930).
| year | Main connections |
|---|---|
| 1924 | 101.730 |
| 1929 | 146.011 |
| 1936 | 194.397 |
| 1946 | 172.376 |
| 1947 | 196.763 |
| 1948 | 219.164 |
| 1949 | 241,491 |
| 1950 | 261,362 |
| 1951 | 267,550 |
| 1952 | 268,952 |
| 1953 | 275,580 |
| 1954 | 287,316 |
| 1955 | 300.006 |
| 1956 | 320.714 |
| 1957 | 344.099 |
| 1958 | 369,626 |
Second World War
At the end of 1937, out of around 200,000 technically available connection units (6700 individual connections and around 133,000 shareholders), 135,321 connections were actually connected in Vienna; in the provincial capitals there were (in extracts) 7992 connections (Graz), 5174 connections (Linz), 4626 (Innsbruck) and 3674 connections (Salzburg).
The connection of Austria ended the independence of the telephone system: A separate law of March 19, 1938 dealt with the "transfer of the Austrian postal and telegraph administration to the German Reich (Deutsche Reichspost)". All postal matters were now managed from Berlin .
The Second World War, which began the following year, brought all further expansion activities to a standstill. During the war years the switchboards and booster offices were badly affected. The situation was particularly precarious in eastern Austria, especially in Vienna. Technical facilities in: Floridsdorf (total loss), Meidling (damage from incendiary bombs in the electoral room and main distributor), Neutorgasse (bomb hits on the neighboring house, air pressure damage) and Hebragasse suffered serious damage. Further damage from shrapnel and bomb fragments was largely avoided by the fact that the windows of the electoral offices were walled up from mid-1944.
In addition, the cable network, which was 2,737 km long at the time, had around 9,600 damaged areas, and more than half of the 8,650 cable outlet objects were no longer functional. Four telephone exchanges in Vienna were also completely inoperable.
Reconstruction after 1945
The problem with the Austrian Post and Telegraph Administration, which was re-established in April 1945, was the occupation zones that were divided up by the occupying powers. Each zone represented a self-contained sovereign territory and the General Directorate in Vienna had no influence on the processes in these zones. Especially in the areas occupied by the Russians, the technical facilities of the Austrian post and telegraph administration were dismantled and transported to Russia by the Red Army (including the offices of Vienna-Hietzing, Vienna-Wattgasse, Vienna-Döbling, parts of the offices of Vienna-Rasumofskygasse and Berggasse). Interestingly enough, the Vienna-Favoriten office, which was in the Soviet zone of occupation, was also dismantled on the instructions of the Red Army. Various cables were also confiscated, including the first coaxial cable Vienna-Bruck an der Leitha and had to be excavated.
Despite these adverse circumstances, there were already 33,364 telephone connections in 1945 and by the end of 1946 there were 172,376 telephone subscribers across Austria. However, the occupying powers exercised the censorship regulations in the telephone sector. International calls were monitored until the end of the four-power censorship in 1953.
In 1947 the FZA, the Central Telecommunications Office, was founded. The tasks of this newly created position included, among other things, the Austria-wide planning of the wide area network, the planning of the Vienna local network, the creation of a long-distance network plan and an attenuation plan . A telecommunications central construction management (FZB) and telecommunications equipment (F-stuff) were also founded.
Uniform dialing system
After the end of the Second World War, only local traffic in the larger cities was automated, i.e. geared to dial-up mode. Nine different dialing systems were used. There were, among others, the "Wiener", the "Grazer" or the "Badener" system as well as the systems "29", "34" and "40". This increased diversity was unprofitable and disruptive. It was therefore absolutely necessary to introduce a uniform system.
On April 8, 1948, the Central Telecommunications Office issued the guidelines for the new, nationally standardized dialing system 48. On April 1, 1950, the first telephone exchange to work according to the new system was put into operation in Eferding. From 1956 the administration was offered a modified version of the System 48; instead of the rotary dial, a motor-driven selector was used , which could set all the 100 possible steps by rotating a small motor. This system was called the W48M. End 1957, the first attempt Official went to the system W48HK that with crossbar switches worked in operation. It was the Vienna-Döbling office. Corresponding experience with crossbar switches had already been gained abroad , and the local company Czeija & Nissl was commissioned to adapt these foreign systems for Austrian conditions. In the case of the crossbar system, the connection was established - as with the other systems - largely keeping pace, but no voters were moved step by step, rather the dialed digit was recorded and saved. Then the corresponding switching point was "marked" in the coordinate switch and the connection was switched through. The crossbar system was also less maintenance-intensive and also less vulnerable. The W48HK system subsequently proved itself in such a way that it was set up in large numbers. The dialing system 48 according to the various systems was in use from April 1, 1950 (Eferding) to February 29, 2000 (Hetzendorf) and was then replaced by the two digital systems OES-D and OES-E.
The conversion of the last manual switchboard with the Miss from office to self-dialing took place in 1972.
Digitization and Liberalization
As early as the mid-1970s, thought was given to the successor generation of the W48 system. On the one hand, due to obsolescence and wear and tear, some offices had to be changed, on the other hand, they did not want to ignore new techniques and technologies.
So - with the involvement of the Austrian delivery companies and the ÖPTV - the ÖFEG, the "Österreichische Fernmeldechnische Entwicklungs- und Förderungsgesellschaft mbH" was founded in 1978 to look for suitable new systems on the international market. In 1981 the decision was made to adapt the two systems, namely the Canadian Nortel DMS100 and the German EWS-D for the Austrian market. Kapsch and Schrack merged to form "AT-Austria Telekom" and dealt with the Canadian system, while Siemens and Alcatel worked in the joint subsidiary "AOSA Telekom" on the German EWS-D. Schrack was taken over by Ericsson in 1994 and therefore left the AT, so that the DMS100 was only adapted by Kapsch.
In 1983 the first field test systems were presented to ÖPTV in the central telecommunications building Arsenal in Vienna and handed over for testing. In mid-1985, the two “real” OES offices were set up in the Krugerstraße and Dreihufeisengasse electoral offices, and from the end of 1985 they were also connected to switching lines for the Vienna network. On January 29, 1986, the two digital offices were opened to public transport.
The nationwide switchover to OES, originally planned by 2008, had to be brought forward by a few years due to the liberalization of telecommunications traffic envisaged by the EU , including alternative network providers. At the end of 1996, the nationwide system swap at the long-distance network level had progressed so far that the last analog devices could be switched off. At the local network level, it took a few more years. In Vienna, on December 24, 1999, the last analog participants switched to digital offices. The switch to the digital network was thus completed by Christmas 1999 - and thus also on time in accordance with an EU directive.
A consequence of Austria joining the EU in 1995 and the resulting liberalization of the telecommunications market was that alternative network providers were now allowed to assign direct connections, initially with fixed number ranges (usually starting with 9 ...), from the beginning of 2000 subscribers who could unbundle themselves could let (switch to the network of an alternative network provider), "take" your former telecom number to the private provider, ie "port" it. A large number of telephone providers were now active on the Austrian market and offered telecommunications products and services.
New products and services
From 1992 onwards, ISDN was available in Austria , which, in contrast to conventional telephone connections between the telephone and the exchange, uses digital signals instead of analog audio frequencies and allows higher transmission speeds. Initially there was only one office in Austria that was ISDN-capable, the Dreihufeisengasse exchange in Vienna. Gradually the exchanges were expanded to be ISDN-compatible.
Broadband Internet ADSL was introduced in 1999. From 2006, the then Telekom Austria offered cable television via the fixed network. Because of the growing demand for broadband through the Internet and cable television, fiber optics are increasingly being used for data transmission . In 2009, Telekom Austria provided Villach with fiber optics, followed by Klagenfurt in 2010. In 2011 the 15th and 19th districts followed in Vienna. Various technologies are used: either the glass fiber extends to the connection at the end customer, or a copper line is used for the last section, with VDSL2 technology being used for the transmission .
In 2014, the conversion of landline voice telephony to “Voice over IP” was completed.
Mobile telephony
There were first attempts to make mobile phone calls in Austria in the first post-war years (from around 1949), and experiments were carried out with car radios. A manual exchange was set up in the service exchange at Schillerplatz in Vienna, which allowed the connection of up to 16 participants. This system was then used to create an internal network (BIAF - BetriebsInterner AutoFunk), which was in operation until the employees were equipped with more manageable mobile phones (around 1995).
In the meantime, the neighboring countries had already made their first experiences with car telephones in the 2 m band (i.e. 150 MHz). The countries Germany, Austria and Luxembourg merged and founded the so-called B-Netz from 1974 . Participants in this network could telephone in all participating countries. Since the B-network had some deficiencies (among other things, you had to know in which radio area the desired subscriber was in order to be able to call him) and only a limited number range was available, a successor system was sought. In 1984 the C-Netz , a mobile network in the 70 cm band, which could be reached under a nationwide uniform area code and which the participants called and searched for nationwide, was put into operation. But here, too, the system soon reached its limits and since the "worldwide" GSM was not yet available, the D network (in the 900 MHz range) had to be switched on from 1990 as a temporary solution. This system soon found great popularity, not least because of the small, handy devices (mostly referred to as “cell phones” in Austria). However, the C and D networks were purely national networks, and radio silence a few kilometers beyond the state border at the latest.
At that time, the radio technical service of the telecommunications operations office of the ÖPTV was still in charge of the so-called car phone and performed all tasks associated with its construction and operation. Mobilkom emerged from this radio technical service in 1995.
The first attempts with GSM technology began at the end of 1991, initially as part of a field test in the greater Vienna area, but large parts of the federal territory were soon developed. From 1996/1997, the mobile communications sector was also liberalized; In addition to Mobilkom ("A1"), initially "Ö-Call", later "max.mobil" and today's "T-Mobile" offered their services, followed later by "Connect Austria" - initially "ONE", later "Orange" , now Hutchison 3G, Telering (now part of T-Mobile).
The further development of the GSM, the UMTS , already allows the transmission of moving images.
See also
literature
- Gerhard Fürnweger: 125 years of the telephone in Austria. Numbers, facts, history and stories about the exhibition. November 2006, full text online ( Memento from January 26, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF, 208 kB)
- Christine Kainz, Eva Leberl: 100 years of telephony in Austria. General Directorate for Post and Telegraph Administration, Vienna 1981.
Web links
- Johann Hartl: Historical events of the telecommunications system - Austria
- Exhibition 125 years of telephone in Austria by A1 Telekom Austria ( press release on the exhibition )
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gerhard Fürnweger: 125 Years of Telephone in Austria, Vienna 2006 ( Memento from January 26, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 213 kB)
- ↑ The automation of telephone traffic in Austria (PDF; 1.3 MB), monthly reports of the Austrian Institute for Economic Research, Volume 32, Supplement No. 59, September 1959
- ↑ Entry on First Telephone Network in the Austria Forum (in the collection of essays)
- ↑ A1 presents the broadband plan for Austria ( memento of December 23, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), November 17, 2011.
- ↑ Press release of the Telekom Austria Group: Telekom Austria Group launches fiber optics in two districts in Vienna ( Memento from February 3, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ), November 3, 2011.
- ↑ derStandard.at: A1 has completely converted voice telephony to VoIP , February 19, 2014