Les réseaux téléphoniques en France et en Grande-Bretagne

Telephone networks in France and Great Britain. The telephone seems to have been of small importance in spatial organization or at least to have found a little place in the cares of architects, town-planners and geographers. In the beginning was the development of telephone networks only settled by industrial and commercial requirements or did it also obey more tenuous logics linked to the shapes of housing or to the political role of different territorial communities ? Only a comparative approach can help to draw main explanatory factors from the evolution of the telephone, thanks to the comparison of two economic and spatial contexts as in contrast as France and Great-Britain at the end of the 19th century. Advanced industrialization in Great-Britain and persistence of country world in France, regionalization and centralism, scattered settlement and conurbation, dynamism of voluntary effort and state interventionism are as many points of differences that incite a comparative analysis. The study of the telephone in its infancy shows some tendencies which allow to examine the present structure of telecommunications in this country. From the creation of the telephone, the voluntary effort, moved by a shrewd interpretation of industrial demand, overrid right away the regulations laid down by the State in order to set up a real structure of firm communication when the telephone was nationalized in 1912, the State had a true private trunks network whereas the operators of telephone must legally limit themselves to local calls ; long distance calls were subdued to the public monopoly. This question is up to date when British Telecom monopoly is summoned under the interconnected stresses of private constructors and of business community which accuse the public service of being unsuited to answer the needs of firms communication. In France, the importance of political thoughts and of social disparities seems to have taken precedence over the economic or functional stakes. The centralized administrative system is not at all incompatible with an affirmation of local authorities which from the beginning came between the telephone and the social background. Still today, local communities are invited to play an important role in the development of video-communication, as well in the execution of networks as in the definition of contents. This characteristic brings nearer France to American pattern than the one of Great-Britain where regionalization does not use an effective interest of local authorities in the implementation of telecommunication networks. At last, urban context also shows significant differences : very early, the telephone followed the English trend - suburbanization whereas in France it stayed within the town ; this phenomenon can be seen through the creation of trunks and tariff laws, a handicap in France for suburban calls

Dynamism · Economics · Economy · Market economy · Monopoly · Political science · Politics · European Socioeconomic and Political Studies · Law