French local authorities consider telecommunications more strategic to the future of local communities than data processing, says a recent study undertaken by France Telecom’s Telecommunications Observatory. The conclusion is drawn despite the fact that data processing is more well established in French local government installations. The study, conducted in the last half of 1993 among a representative sample of 500 locations, shows that the importance accorded to data processing has not changed since the last survey in 1991, while telecommunications are viewed as increasingly strategically important over the coming years. The Observatory says the difference is due to local governments having integrated information systems activity into their organisations more fully and because they are more familiar with it. Telecommunications services, on the other hand, particularly the newest services, have just begun arriving on the scene and are therefore perceived as more promising than computing. The difference is revealed in local governments’ organisational structures: while the majority of cities with more than 30,000 inhabitants, as well as regions and counties, boast an information technology service department, only 10% of these respondents have a telecommunications service. Information technology budgets also remain much larger than those for telecommunications. The average informatics budget in 1992, including data transmission costs, was approximately $590m while telecommunications got only about $330m. The gap, however, is closing: more than 60% of those surveyed expected either average or strong growth in their telecommunications expenses, while on the informatics side only 40% expected to increase their budgets. The use of telecommunications equipment was becoming routine, nonetheless, even in small towns. The installed base of facsimile machines, for example, grew to 23,000 in 1993 from 8,000 in 1991. The growth was particularly notable in communities of between 700 and 5,000 inhabitants: three times as many were equipped in 1993 as in 1991. Groupe Special Mobile cellular phones and Alphapage also saw strong growth, as more than 50% of communities with greater than 100,000 people were equipped and the number of pager subscribers doubled in the majority of communities. The report sees areas for continued growth: improvement of reception and informational functions, with voice messaging in regional governmental offices and medium and large-sized communities; continued replacement of old switching equipment; switch over of analogue network connections toward digital services, including Integrated Services Digital Network for data and voice transmission; and acquisition of equipment, above all, facsimile messagings, small-capacity private telephone exchanges, and mobile telecommunications equipment.
