Belgrade is Falling Apart

It almost turned out that this article which deals with the lousy functioning of telephones could not have been written due to the - lousy functioning of telephones. If you don't believe it, pick up your phone, and you will easily be convinced that, when talking about telephones, Belgrade has already fallen apart. One of the standards of prosperity and the development chances of a society is the number of telephone lines per number of inhabitants; in developed industrial countries that relation amounts to one telephone line per two inhabitants.

The question - how come such a profitable business such as telecommunications in general, and telephony especially, is growing and expanding in the whole world except here - causes a pitiful smile on the faces of the experienced subjects of this system. Try to apply for a telephone line; instead of making the Post Telephone Telegraph (PTT) company happy for wanting to hand them your money, they will ask of you: a written application with an enormous amount of data, your personal identity card, your contract for the lease of your apartment and a certain amount of money for the line (starting from 800 Marks, payable in three installments, thank you very much). "In this country, it is easier to get a license for arms than a phone line", concluded a potential subscriber. "Which is why there is a larger number of guns per inhabitant than phone lines".

If only, on top of that, the service was mediocre, the telephone subscriber would think that he was privileged. The connections are mostly lousy; the number of calls which end up nowhere, and miss completely ("the telephone exchange missed"), or in which you find yourself in the middle of someone else's conversation (entertainment which is becoming more and more popular) is growing. The computer analysis by which the calls of VREME's three phone lines are measured showed an unexpectedly large number of calls whose duration was shorter than one minute (a period unimaginable for journalists). Inquiry brought us to the conclusion that the reasons for such short calls were in most cases a wrong connections or silence on the other end (the call got nowhere), than a busy line. The fax subscribers know best what quality the phone lines are: as a consequence, appeals are more frequent for their partners to print the fax message with the largest letters, since chances are that a normally sized letter of a typewriter, for example (a 10 or 12 font size), will come out illegible.

The reasons for such a state are of a system nature - unfortunately. The Yugoslav PTT (YPTT) is a system which was installed - such as it is - during the communist times and hasn't even slightly changed in the meantime, just as all other vital things haven't changed either. Which means that it functions like the other infrastructure systems: on the basis of depressed prices; that it has been denied any development investments; that their managers are political favorites, and not experts; that it is looked upon as a mercy of the government towards its subjects, and not as a factor of development and growth; that it hands out charity rather than earnings. An example of such - system - behavior was the first problem concerning mobile phones, at the beginning of the far-gone 1991: at the moment when we should have jumped in for mobile phones, YPTT dragged out and nibbled, while Croatian PTT immediately started such transactions and introduced their "mobitel" system which even today (even though it isn't all that modern and compatible with the world) is functioning and turning out an enviable income (by the way: it covers a good part of Bosnia and Herzegovina).

All of that has brought us to the situation in which the war and the sanctions befell us. And that was the situation in which the center of Belgrade had a Siemens mechanical main telephone exchange dating from 1938. Then (the last data is from 1986) the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) had 6.6 inhabitants per one phone; now the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SRJ) has 4.9. The wars caught PTT in the midst of a huge business transaction with certain foreign companies: with Siemens and the French Alcatel negotiations were just being held over the delivery of new, modern digital telephone exchanges. As Milorad Jaksic, general manager of the Serbian PTT has recently reminded us, five years ago a "joint venture" was created with capital of over 30 million Marks (VF-Tel - 62%, Siemens - 33% and Genex - 5%) but it was frozen. Now it is expected that the Nis based company VF-Tel and Siemens shall jointly invest 15-20 million Marks into the project for the modernization of telephony in Serbia in the next ten years (300.000 lines per year) and that idea has met with a rather loud approval of the Republic Minister Aleksa Jokic. VF-Tel has, as its general manager Velimir Stoskovic says, during the sanctions delivered equipment to PTT Serbia in the value of some thirty million Marks and - obviously - appears as the main bearer of the future development. However, it shall be necessary to examine the future role of the French Alcatel: the introduction of the sanctions found Alcatel in the midst of installing a new main telephone exchange in Belgrade, credited by France with 350 million Marks, in accordance with the contract from 1991. Besides that, Alcatel has obliged itself to credit the joint company Alcatel - EI Pupin which would deliver equipment for 100 thousand new telephone lines per year. With the planned participation of Siemens in the mobile telephony, the value of the project was then assessed at around two billion Dollars up to the year 2000. The only thing that was achieved out of it was the telephone exchange Alcatel E-10B with 10.000 lines in the center of Belgrade.

The general manager of PTT Serbia, Milorad Jaksic, talking of the time period needed for SRJ's re-integration into the world telecommunications network (until the year 2005), said that telephone exchanges should be replaced for around a million lines, while the existing capacities should be enhanced for another two million lines. At the same time, one of the managers of PTT Serbia has anonymously expressed concern that Serbia is threatened with a "collapse of the telephone system if measures aren't immediately taken". The general manager Jaksic also said that PTT could not undertake such a task on its own, from its profits, and is expecting credits from foreign countries as well as participation of local industry in the role of stockholders (assuming a future public company is formed).

In the meantime, private investors have entered telecommunications. First Zoran Markovic, owner of the Bell Pagette spread the pager network of Bel Pagette over the whole country (around 20.000 pagers up till now), which illustrates the need to "keep in touch" in a dramatic way and shows a shortage of telephone lines. Then the para-state Karic Brothers (BK) company arrived on the scene. Markovic intended to start a mobile phone system which promised a large profit when the Karic brothers ousted him from the market. Now BK Telekom appears as the most important factor on the SRJ telecommunications market, while Yugoslav PTT is still hesitating. As Ana Bovan says for VREME, the marketing director of the BK Mobtel system, their network of mobile telephony (analogous, NMT 900 MHz) can stand up to 20.000 lines; 5000 are ready to be bought, another 6000 have already been bought, 15 receivers have been installed and another 12 have been delivered; Belgrade, Novi Sad, Pancevo and Panonija are already covered; soon Pozarevac and Nis will be covered as well, like islands, while the third phase - covering traffic routes between the islands - should be completed by summer, and the whole territory of Serbia should have a signal by the end of the year.

Otherwise, the mobile BK Mobtel telephone now costs around 19.000 Dinars and shows a tendency towards cheaper rates in the future.