Spanish Phones - And What They Don't Do

by Peter Bruce

The following article is reprinted from England's Financial Times.  It originally appeared last summer, so please take that into account when coming across references to "this year," "next year," etc.  We appreciate it.

As the Spanish summer gets hotter, so do Spanish tempers.  And with good reason.

In the space of just a few months, it seems that Spain's telephone system, once one of the most efficient in Europe, has all but collapsed.  Spaniards lucky enough to have telephones find themselves unable to make calls or are frequently cut off when they do.

On average last week, it was taking nine or ten attempts to call London from Madrid.  Getting through is only half the problem - domestic and international lines crackle and rasp constantly.

Some 350,000 people in Spain are waiting for Telefónica, the once-vaunted telephone monopoly, to install telephones.  most will wait at least six months.  About 25,000 Spanish villages do not yet have a public telephone, according to some reports.

A European consumers group in Brussels, in a recent study, said Telefónica was now taking roughly ten times as long as its French, Dutch, or Danish counterparts to install telephones.

Other than Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, the study said, Telefónica appeared most frequently at the bottom of its ratings.

The Spanish service costs double the French and even the West German ones, the Brussels report said, and its rate of wrong connections was the highest in the EC.  Last week, it emerged that the Government had appointed a commission to study Telefónica's investment plans for next year - an extraordinary move, considering that Telefónica is a private company.

There seems little doubt that the head of Telefónica's affable chairman, Mr. Luis Solana, is on the block.  Although a member of the governing Socialist party, a friend of the Prime Minister, and the brother of the Education Minister, Mr. Solana has seemed desperately short of support as the public outcry over Telefónica's service has risen.

Opposition politicians have had great fun with a retort attributed to him, to the effect that "perfection is fascist."

A colleague recently arrived in Madrid and trying to order a home telephone from his office failed to find anything democratic in being told by the Telefónica functionary at the other end of the line: "Sorry, I can't hear a thing you're saying."

"So whose fault is that?" he wailed.

Mr. Solana, confronted with failure, has not tried to disguise the scale of the problem.  The waiting list for telephones will probably grow, he has said, to 430,000 this year.

He has promised that more new lines will be in place by September.  Spain has about 15.5 million telephones and 10 million lines.  Telefónica plans to install 1.5: million new lines this year and 2.5 million more next year.  But there is no saying whether that will improve matters.

Telefónica has been caught wholly unawares by the explosion in telephone demand in Spain.  In the past two years, applications for telephones have grown by close to eight percent a year, a huge leap on the average two percent growth a year since 1970.

Mr. Solana has said things will be more normal next year but some Telefónica officials suggest it could take five years.

Appearing on Spanish television this weekend, Mr. Solana said: "My main mistake was not having believed that the Spanish economy would be going as well as it is now.  I did not believe statistics forecasting Spain's economic boom."  The service was not a catastrophe, he insisted, but it was "improvable."

What irks Spanish consumers - and in Barcelona, business groups are warning that the state of the telephones is damaging to competitiveness - is that this trouble has arrived along with record profits for Telefónica last year and higher-than-ever investment this year and next year.

What hurts even more is that Mr. Solana is about to spend some of that in Argentina, where Telefónica wants to buy 40 percent of a new PTT being created there.  The Russians have also just signed a deal with Telefónica under which the Spanish are to install a rural telephone network 600 miles from Moscow and a public phone system in the Soviet capital itself.

Mr. Solana's comfort in the short term at least, is that even worse trouble at the Post Office diverts some frustration away from Telefónica.  The Spanish postal service estimates that up to 2 million letters and parcels are, effectively, stuck at post offices around the country.

The postal unions say this is non- sense - there are at least 11 million pieces stuck in Madrid alone.

As Spain approaches its first presidency of the European Community next January, the chaos in many of its institutions is going to become embarrassing.  Europeans who want to complain about it may, however, have to fly or drive to Madrid to do so.