Oh wow. So some countries had free local calls, which boosted the local BBS culture. That's pretty cool, huh. I had no idea. In my home country there was no such thing, so BBS's tended to be owned by big companies.
Famously communist UK as well. BT (British Telecom) was the state owned telecom provider that also ran the phone books.
And famously communist Germany with Deutsche Telekom (Formerly part of the national post system, privatised in 1995) that also made telephone books. Also worth noting that the German government still has a significant stake in Deutsche Telekom.
Oh and famously communist Netherlands with KPN the state run post and telecoms provider.
And famously communist Spain with Telefonica being previously majority owned by the state (under Franco no less).
I mean most of European telecoms seem to have been state owned until the early 90s.
There was a similar period in the US when regional phone companies were required to lease lines out to 3rd parties, but I believe either the policy was changed or a court case deemed the rule to be invalid.
It was not totally centralized technically. You could host your own full service, using your own modem banks and servers. The drawback was that you would not be discoverable in the minitel directory and you would not get the billing system etc. People needed to know your phone number and dial it to connect.
Minitel took a long time to die because it was a cash cow, both for France Telecom and service providers. The economic model was very simple: users pay the time spent online, and the revenue is shared between the telco and the service provider. No ads, no tracking ;)
It was also successful because every household got a Minitel for free in the mid-80's, when personal computers were very uncommon. And if you had a computer, you could use the Minitel as an external model with a serial port adapter and reach BBSes! Because of that I once had to explain to my parents why I was spending hours calling a number in Germany, which was not a cheap thing :P
National Telecom deployed Ericsson HiS (https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_internet_Solution), a proprietary twist on ISDN (max 115kb/s, cheap to manufacture external USB dongle), between 1999 and 2004. Signup was about one full entry level local salary, then 1/6 monthly bill. I didnt hesitate one second, my monthly dialup bills were already approaching ~1/4 of what I was making.
At the time there were no alternatives other than local neighbor coop networks sharing >$1K monthly bills for T1 line.
I remember 30 years ago in the UK being envious of US telecom regulation. The US had free local calls - unheard of in the UK then and you could connect modems to the phone line. In the UK that was banned as the lines were all owned by the government monopoly and could not be touched so you had to put an acoustic coupler on the phone handset, believe it or not. Now the UK surprisingly seems to have better telecom regs than the US.
Here in Norway we have two mobile networks (Telenor and Netcom). Telenor is the old state company like BT, that used to be called Televerket. They also own most of the physical lines like in the UK. Netcom is the only privately started company that acquired a license in the 90s.
When Telenor were privatised the license required them to sell capacity at cost to other operators. The same license requirements hold for mobile towers so all the small operators can piggyback on their infrastructure at cost. The result is that we have over 50 operators competing on services and add-ons while having approximately the same base network quality.
This is largely the case for ISPs too and it works great I think.
> Maybe the french stuff was more useful in practice
It was highly pushed by the national telco. The telco lent terminals for free so they were easily available, and there were tons of useful services, especially but not only from national companies: starting from the 80s you had stocks, online shopping, travel reservations, information services, message boards, databases[0], games, dating sites, ...
Monetisation / payment was integrated from the start, through the phone bill: just like premium-rate phone numbers, minitel had premium-rate services (both first and third party), so you could make money out of valuable services. It was nothing compared to the modern web (~25000 services and about $1bn revenue at its height), but for the mid-80s to mid-90s and out of a population of 60m it was quite massive.
[0] trying to get rid of phonebooks was a big reason for minitel in the first place
That is fairly accurate.. the story of The Bell System is pretty interesting if not totally bizarre. Things are a bit more capitalist these days since most transport is IP and the commercial IT sector drives most development there, but cell networks are still largely the product of a handful of companies as PSTN switching and interface equipment were.
I was making the argument that the price for a local loop was price competitive with nationalized telecoms, but with little to no wait to have service provisioned - in many cases though the nationalized services were cheaper, by far even - but you may be pressed with a months or years long wait to establish service, because of capacity limitations, similarly in some countries you often would have experienced a dial tone delay of minutes from the time you picked up the phone, and/or would have had to schedule your long distance call many hours or days in advance because of limited circuit capacity.
Back story: Austria is one of the most competitive countries as far as mobile phone plans go. There were three big companies, A1 (previously state-owned, a bit similar to AT&T), One (now Orange, owned by French Telecom) and Max (now T-Mobile, owned by German Telecom). In 2003 a new company, Hutchinson 3 (branded as "Drei") emerged. Backed by (for a small country like Austria) seemingly unlimited money from Hutchison Whampoa they built a completely new network (again: Austria is pretty small). They only cared about getting customers and started a price dumping war with the other three players.
In 2007 Hutchison 3G introduced a new kind of mobile plan called Sixback. Because of the - in their opinion - high termination fees they offered 6 (Euro-)cents per minute on incoming calls from the three other providers. In Europe you don't pay for incoming calls like you do in America, but getting paid for incoming calls was new. The plan became quite popular, there have been reports of peoply having over two dozen SIM cards from other providers just so they could "load" their Sixback plan using the free minutes from the other plans and then transferring the money via a 0900 number. (0900 is the area code for phone sex and similar numbers where you pay a lot of money per minute and the receiver of the call receives most of that money).
Of course the other providers hated Hutchison 3 for that plan, but that quickly turned around when the regulation body lowered the termination fee, so that every Sixback call now loses money for Hutchison 3. They don't offer that plan anymore, but there are lots of customers who still have that plan and obviously refuse to be switched to a newer plan.
This is somewhat close how Germany handles it. When the monopoly of the state-run telephone service was destroyed, Telekom was allowed to keep the physical lines, but had to rent them out to any company that wants them, at a rate set by an official oversight organization. I think this was a great success.
The only early network that was across "lots of different countries" was the NMT system and that was in the Scandinavian countries, which have always been their own special sort of group of countries.
I don't recall a company in Berlin building out networks in Greece, but that's the equivalent of what McCaw Cellular was doing in the late 80s/early 90s
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