Minitel reciever.
Why are the French so internet unfriendly?
Why do so few of them have up and running web sites?
If they do have an internet address why do so few of them reply to an enquiry?
In an attempt to book a hotel for a few days in July in the south of France Sile sent off about four queries about availability last week.
Two days later not one single reply.
So she rang them all.
Did you get my email?
Ah, No, they answered, it mustn’t have got to us….
At the moment, to further try to understand the French I am reading John Ardagh’s excellent book “France in the New Century”
In a throwaway line in the book all was revealed.
Before the general acceptance of the internet the French, in an attempt to abolish telephone directories, brought in the Minetel.
This is the strange black box one often sees in the corner of rented properties in France.
This was a sort of telephonic search engine and, as it was a French invention, they decided that it could be their Internet.
Consequently, at the beginning of the year two thousand, only a half million French households were connected to the Internet, this compared with four million in Britain.
Now the situation has improved but , in internet terms they are still some years behind.
So if you want to communicate urgently with a Frenchman, use the phone.
Comments
G r e e n . . .
on May 22, 2006Hello Martin.
You’re joking, aren’t you?
First of all, the picture your showing is not one of a minitel. Check this link instead:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
I’m a data network and telecom engineer with more than 20 years working experience in this business. And if I’ve worked most of the time in France, I’ve worked in other countries including 3 years in Ireland.
I had an email address on server base d in France in 1993. But my real first email address was created 1988 on server based in the US that I could access through, guess what? a Minitel of course. Because you see a Minitel terminal was much more than an eletronic phonebook. One could accesses hundreds of services through it. First of all administrative information could be found there. You could book train, plane, rental cars, theatre or concert tickets. But what was even more successfull on the Minitel network, was the hundred of thousand of Chat rooms. That’s right, just like on the Internet but about 20 years before.
Also, I don’t know where you got those number figure, but in year 2000 there was about 2 millions of households accessing to Internet not half a million.
Also when I left for Ireland in 2000, I left behind a 512Kb/s ADSL access. Some of my friend had acces to a 10Mb/s access to the Internet through the house TV cable system. GPRS connection to the Internet through GSM mobile phone was widely available throughout the country.
When I arrived in Dublin, xDSL technologie was almost inexistant (By the way, my customers in Ireland was Eircom, Eircell now Vodafone and NTL). The only solution to connect a private house to the Internet was through crappy 56kb/s modem connection. I tried to get an ISDN line that would provide a 128Kb/s connection but it took Eircom about one year to connect me just as was ready to move to new house.
Today, I’m back in France. To access your website, I’m using a 20Mb/s ADSL connection. But I know I’m going to change this connection as soon as Wimax (a wireless broadband access network providing up 80Mb/s bandwidth) will be released in France in 2007.
Sure some people don’t know and don’t want to know how to uses those new high technology tool. But I don’t think you can judges a whole country abbility to use those technologies just because one of it’s inhabitant didn’t reply to one of your mail.
But I’m sure you were just joking. Right?
The comments are closed.