Postal Telegraph and Telephone

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A postal, telegraph, and telephone (or PTT) is or was a government agency responsible for postal mail, telegraph, and telephone services in many countries worldwide other than North America and Japan. In some countries, the former government-monopoly PTT has been partially or completely privatized in recent years. In some of those privitizations, the PTT was renamed completely, whereas in others, the name of the privatized corporation has been only slightly modified, such as PT Telecom in Indonesia.

[edit] PTT-based countries

In countries that had a PTT unit of government, typical the vast majority of forms of distribution of information fell under the auspices of the PTT, whether that be the delivery of printed publications and individual letters in the postal mail, the transmission of telephonic audio, or the transmission of telegraphic on-off signals, and in some countries, the broadcast of one-way (audio) radio and (audio-video) television signals. In many countries with a current or former PTT, the PTT also was responsible for the manufacture and standardization of telephone equipment. Often the presence of a single PTT in a country implied a single monolithic approach to the distribution of information in that country, which as an advantage permitted efficient deployment of a single national standard for each topic instead of on-going debate about competing ideas, but which as a disadvantage typically stifled alternative ideas from emerging once a legacy implementation had been widely deployed.

[edit] Bell System countries

Under an entirely different school of thought, in countries that were under the influence of the Bell System, the concept of a government-permitted private-corporation monopoly existed since the 19th century. Such countries that were part of or under the influence of the Bell System, include the USA, Canada, Japan, and various Caribbean islands. In each of these countries, the telephone monopoly and telegraph monopoly were separate from the government postal mail. In the USA and Canada, the telephone monopoly was the companies affiliated under the Bell System brand, named after Alexander Graham Bell in the USA and his father Alexander Melville Bell in Canada, whereas the government-permitted telegraph monopoly was Western Union. In the USA, the broadcast of radio and television signals never was tantamount to a monopoly but rather was, at the network level, an oligopoly that has been regulated by the FCC since their inception while telephone service (apart from interstate service) was regulated by State authorities.

Portugal, until 1968, had a mix of the two sistems, with Edison Gower Bell Telephone Company of Europe Ltd as the owner of the telephone system in Lisbon and Oporto (from 1882 to 1887; later sold to Anglo-Portuguesa de Telecomunicações) and Correios, Telefones e Telégrafos, a public company, as the owner of the telephone system in the rest of the country (incuding the former colonies). From 1968 to 2000, the Telefones de Lisboa e Porto, a public company, were the owners of the telephone system in Lisbon and Oporto and the Correios, Telefones e Telégrafos were the owners of the telephone system in the rest of the country (until the spin-off of the telephone system in 1990s, which formed Telecom Portugal). During all this time, Companhia Portuguesa de Rádio Marconi (which was a joint-venture between the Portuguese state and Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company) was the long-distance arm. These are all now PT Comunicações, which is owned by Portugal Telecom.

Prior to the 1984 break-up of the Bell System, the manufacture and standardization of telephone equipment was largely performed by the then Western Electric now Lucent (and its affiliates the then Northern Electric now Nortel and the then Nippon Electric now NEC). Without a single authoritative government body enacting a single vision nationwide, a non-PTT approach to information exchange inevitably led to multiple companies and multiple companies inevitably led to increased political pressure for breaking up and fully deregulating the government-permitted monolopy to permit increased competition. This pursuit of this increased competition among multiple non-PTT corporations in the former Bell System countries contributed to the interest in privatizing the PTTs in PTT-based countries worldwide.