Deutsche Telekom will discontinue its telephone directory support on December 1, 2024. The company had announced this in May itself and now this step is being taken. This marks the end of an era, because what was then called “miss from office“This has been the case since the introduction of telephony in the late 19th century. Also because connections in local exchanges were made using hand-inserted cables. As a caller or the called person, You always had a telephone operator; direct dialing was established later.
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Carlinkit Mini SE in testDue to the importance of information service, the former number 118 was also one of the three-digit speed dial numbers along with emergency numbers 110 and 112. With the privatization of the telephony market in the 1990s, 118XX was established as the number range with which all types of directory assistance services could be offered. Telecom obtained the 11833 that were used so far and advertised it heavily, including television spots, like the private providers. “You will be helped” was the slogan of the largest private provider with the number 11880, represented by Verona Feldbusch.
Maximum 550 million calls per year
The mid-1990s saw the highest demand. According to Telecom, there were a record number of 550 million calls for directory assistance in 1995 and since then demand has declined by 20 percent annually. It is said that around 20 lakh calls were received in 2023. The service is no longer cost-covering. Until recently, the service was mainly controlled through a call center in the Mecklenburg-West Pomerania town of Passwalk. a present According to contributions from Deutschlandfunk Most of the employees are retiring.
There are still forty employees; At its peak, approximately 5,000 people worked in telecom for the service, which in its heyday became a source of information for all kinds of topics. Initially people were looking at telephone books, but later it included microfilms and eventually computers. Like information, telephone directory CDs were good business for many providers in the 1990s. Today, all of these have largely replaced the Internet, so telcos also believe that this service “ran out of time,
Dozens of other providers left
Even when the end of Telecom Information was announced, there was criticism, including from the social organization VDK. Older and poorer people cannot use or buy smartphones and therefore cannot easily use internet search engines to look up numbers. However, telecom information is not the only service: the Federal Network Agency lists it in its Current list of providers A few dozen other information services.
If you want to call 11833 again today out of nostalgia, you should know that each call from a landline costs 1.99 euros and is usually higher than from a mobile phone. In the 1980s when the Federal Postal Service still had the telephone monopoly, it was a fee unit that cost 20 pfennig for a long time. Along with domestic information on 11833, the international information (formerly 11834) and wake-up service, which could also be reached on 11833, will also be discontinued. By the way, it was not the friendly woman who had been calling me for many years, but a recorded male voice.
(Never)
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