France’s mature viewdata – or videotext, to give it its parvenu Johnny-come-lately name – service, called Minitel worldwide after the name of the terminal itself, experimented with higher-speed and colour transmission and new service dimensions last year, while recording respectable growth in a disastrous economic climate. The newest mutation of Minitel (or Teletel as France Telecom terms the service), is Audiotel. Audiotel saw its first full year of operation in 1993 and recorded a 91% satisfaction rating from the first survey, which was conducted last November and December among 1,500 users. France Telecom assembled 26 partners in various industries over the last 12 months to experiment with possible service offerings for its Teletel Vitesse Rapide – High-Speed Teletel – which will operate at 9.6Kbps, or eight times faster than currently. Such a speed is not admittedly conducive to great volumes of data and image, but France Telecom says, nevertheless, that the information gleaned from the experiments will enable the commercial launch this year of Teletel Vitesse Rapide.

Smart Card

Specifically, the operator will provide photographic Minitel 2 terminals running at 9.6Kbps in mid-1994. User charges for the new terminal should be finalised by March 1 this year. In mid-1995, France Telecom plans to launch new Minitel terminals that will integrate a Smart Card reader to facilitate electronic payment. Some of those applications were initiated last year, despite the unavailability of Minitel terminals equipped with a card reader. Telefact, which enables electronic payment of bills, was made available to Electricite de France and Gaz de France customers nationwide from last July and will be offered to France Telecom customers in the Paris region by the end of the current quarter. Facitel, established in December in a partnership between the French Societe National de Chemins de Fer national railway operator, Air Inter and the Banque Nationale de Paris, enables consumers to buy goods from either the railway or the airline via a Minitel terminal equipped with a card reader. Audiotel, which is accessed via a telephone and an 8-digit number beginning with 36, almost doubled the number of services available on it to 3,700, including banking information and mail-order sales. Customers of the Societe Generale bank, for example, can get daily account information by dialling its 36 number and inputting the account number and an access code. Total revenues for Teletel (viewdata services) and Audiotel (speech-based) information services at France Telecom last year attained approximately $1,470m, with Teletel’s share up 15.5% to $1,140m and 18-month-old Audiotel accounting for the rest. Teletel revenues paid by France Telecom to its third-party service providers totalled approximately $500m, an increase of 17.6% over 1992. An installed base of 6.5m Minitel terminals (up 3.4% from 1992) and 500,000 personal computer Minitel emulation boards generated a total of 112.7m hours of connect time, which included calls for Teletel services and electronic directory consultation. Teletel, which comprises six main access numbers for services ranging from train reservations to France’s latest trade balance data, accounted for 89.7m hours of connection, representing an increase of 3.2% over 1992. The number of such services increased last year by 15.5% to 23,227. France Telecom customers made more calls per month, on average, to Teletel services in 1993 – 14.3 compared to 13.7 in 1992 – but the average duration of those calls dropped from 5:15 minutes to 4:92. The reduced average call time reflects a better mastery of Minitel use and a drop in the consultation of leisure time services, France Telecom said – Euro Disney SCA is in trouble primarily because France is so deep in recession. Trans-border Teletel enquiries still represent only a tiny fraction of the total, with 300,000 hours of connect time, but their number was nevertheless up by 4% over 1992.

By Marsha Johnston

In 1993, France Telecom added access to viewdata networks in the Czech

Republic and Gabon and is preparing access to Greece. As a result, it says that Teletel users can consult nearly every foreign viewdata system using the CEPT Conference on European Posts & Telecommunications standard, including Germany, Spain, the US, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Portugal, the UK, and Switzerland. Although use of Teletel’s services increased, use of its electronic telephone directory remained flat at 23m hours of connection. France Telecom contends that the directory’s revised user interface, with its enriched ergonomics and natural language, was responsible for a drop in the average call duration, to 1:77 minutes. That the average time for a directory consultation dropped last year is not necessarily to be doubted; that it means the user went away satisfied from a directory search session is less certain. Since the introduction of the revised directory interface, the service has seen a dramatic decline in its usefulness as a resource for locating information for which only one or two elements is known. Whereas, for example, the directory used to prompt a wider geographic search immediately upon not locating the requested item, it now takes more steps to get the same prompt. Furthermore, rather than search an entire region, for example, the system requires the user to continue specifying right down to the county or city, completely eliminating the possibility of clarifying vague information. In 1994, France Telecom plans to launch two specialised electronic directories: one for business-to-business research and another for obtaining international phone numbers in the French language. Audiotel services received 477m calls in 1993 for a total of 15.5m hours, for which Audiotel service providers realised approximately $175m in 1993 from France Telecom.

Older men

Audiotel services seem to appeal more to men than women and more to older men than younger, according to the first survey of its users conducted by Paris-based market research firm Sylab Ypsis SA. With the average user making 48 Audiotel calls per year, men made 55 while women consulted the system only 40 times. Men aged between 15 and 24 made 32 calls per year, whereas their counterparts aged 35 to 49 called Audiotel 55 times in 1993 and men over 50 called it 57 times, the study said. The services most often used in the last 12 months were weather forecasts (55% of users surveyed), banking and insurance services (48%), games and horoscopes (18%) and movie and television listings (16%), followed by news, mail-order sales and governmental information, each with 14% – it is France Telecom’s misfortune that there is distressingly little interest in cricket in France. The survey saw a correspondence between the use of Audiotel and Teletel. Half of the Audiotel users (51%) said they have access to a Minitel terminal at home or at the office, and 45% said they use it. Furthermore, 55% of the respondents declared that they use Audiotel to get different types of information from the stuff they seek from Teletel. Only 29% said that they use Audiotel to get the same information and even fewer, 12%, said that they use the networks interchangeably, depending on the circumstance. Despite a high rate of overall satisfaction (69% were rather satisfied and 22% very satisfied), the respondents demonstrated some confusion about the cost of Audiotel services. First of all, 56% did not know what their previous consultation had cost them, but almost half, (48%), had an overall perception of its cost as either expensive or rather expensive. But, when asked about the relationship between quality of service and price, 52% said that the price was justified, and only 26% still complained it was too expensive.