To complement the growth in its international telephone and directory assistance service, France Telecom has added an international directory service for Minitel subscribers. Called Siriel, the service initially covers the US, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Belgium, and is accessed through the code 3619 on a Minitel terminal or personal computer equipped with a Minitel link. France Telecom said it is in negotiations with Germany, Italy and the UK and expects to add them to the service within the next few months. France Telecom’s international phone traffic grew at some 4% between 1992 and 1993, while calls to its operator-assisted international directory assistance totalled four million in 1993, having risen some 6%. The tariff for the directory is one of the highest for Minitel services, at about $0.96 a minute. While acknowledging that the cost is elevated, Jean-Claude Marcovici, France Telecom’s manager of information service products, believes it’s a reasonable price for the service it brings to the client, with direct access to the phone numbers. Luc Guillet, president and managing director of Intelmatique, the wholly owned France Telecom subsidiary responsible for managing the Teletel viewdata network, said the service was made possible in part by the use of the TPH-28 protocol for database access among European operators. The service is less rich in functionality than the French directory service, largely for reasons of language barrier; information cannot be searched by key-word. It provides a limited amount of translation for city names and will complete words from a root, and also provides a small dictionary of key words and their equivalents in the appropriate language.
