Improving telephone system

Prior to recent changes, the waiting time for telephone installation in Hungary was several years. In 1994, Deutsche Bundespost Telekom and Ameritech International paid $875 million for a 30.2% stake in Hungary's national telephone company Matav. Directed by its foreign partners, Matav spend $2 billion over the following three years to install one million telephone lines The number of phone lines per inhabitant should triple before the end of the decade, bringing Hungary up to current western European levels. This will more than wipe out Hungary's 1995 backlog of 735,000 phone applicants. Likewise across eastern Europe, falling technology costs, foreign investment and deregulation should eventually bring telephones to the other 22 million people that the International Telecommunication Union calculated in 1995 were still on telephone waiting lists. Some eastern European are already hopping off the waiting lists for land lines by purchasing cellular phones. At the end of 1993, there were 95,000 cellular phones in eastern Europe. In 1995 there were 150,000. Portable phone customers in Poland and Hungary use their phones an average of more than 4000 minutes a month, triple the rates in western Europe. Voice mail is also readily taken up because people do not have answering machines to stop using.