Antiquated Phone System Keeping Poland on Hold

Film director Roman Polanski, passing through Poland recently, was asked by a local interviewer if he might consider returning to make a movie in his native country. Polanski said he’d very much like to do so but that, unfortunately, problems of communication would paralyze any such undertaking.

“It’s easier to make a movie without cameras than without telephones,” Polanski said.

In a country where it takes an estimated 33 years to get to the top of the telephone waiting list, millions of Poles would be ready to call in their agreement with Polanski’s complaint--if they could find a phone.

The difficulties of film making are but a small concern at the moment in Poland, where the problem of how to hoist the Polish state out of a 40-year-old slough of centrally planned backwardness is the overwhelming issue facing the new non-Communist government.

Still, officials agree that lack of a modern telephone system has become one major handicap to the development of the Polish economy.

As the government pushes forward with radical plans for opening up markets and encouraging joint-venture foreign trade schemes, and as thousands of small businesses haltingly but hopefully put down roots, the pressure on Poland’s antiquated telephone system has been growing daily.

“I’ve been coming here for three years,” a frustrated British businessman said not long ago, “and the telephones seem to get worse every time I come. It took me three hours to get a call through to London yesterday.”

Small wonder. According to officials in the government-run telephone system, there are exactly 29 outgoing telephone lines from Poland to Britain. There are 59 incoming lines. This means that at any one time, there can be a total of 88 telephone conversations between Poland, with 39 million people, and Britain, with 56 million.

Officials of the Telecommunications Ministry say the system has not really declined but that its limited capacity has simply been overwhelmed by the steadily mounting demand.

Indeed, as Western nations hurriedly put together aid packages--now on the way in the form of foodstuffs, debt relief, new lending agreements and relaxation of trade barriers--some experts say the West could hardly do worse than to help provide Poland with an adequate telephone system, thereby linking the country with that part of the world it wants most to join.

Only 82 Lines to West Germany

The scarcity of international telephone lines is sobering to any student of the Polish economy. According to Jozef Kozlowski, head of the international section of the Telecommunications Ministry, Poland has only 82 outgoing phone lines to West Germany, the country’s largest Western trading partner, and 144 incoming lines.

To the United States, there are 25 outgoing lines and 228 incoming, giving the United States, by a large margin, the largest conversational capacity with Poland. Kozlowski provided the following breakdown for other key countries:

France, outgoing, 27, incoming, 46; Belgium, 17 and 18; Sweden, 32 and 24; Austria, 24 and 16; Italy, 30 and 34; Canada, 12 and 24, and the Soviet Union, 22 and 22.

Total National Capacity

Telephone officials say these numbers reflect the total national capacity. Contrary to common assumptions, there are no special lines reserved for the government. Although government officials get priority service, they use the same lines as the general public.

Poland’s problem is echoed in Hungary, another rapidly reforming Communist Bloc nation, suggesting that overwhelmed telephone systems are in themselves a sign of major change in the socialist world, as demand for communication with the West--mainly for commercial reasons--rises sharply.

The Poles have been negotiating with several multinational firms for a new international telephone exchange and the installation of a domestic telephone system. The previous Communist-ruled government signed a letter of intent to purchase an international exchange from Alcatel, a French concern, even though a commission of Polish experts rated it third behind systems offered by Siemens, the German-Dutch firm, and a joint bid by the American firms AT&T; and T. R. Telecom.

‘A Political Decision’

The issue has now become the focus of public debate. The new government’s minister of telecommunications, Marek Kucharski, says the government is not committed to the French offer and says he assumes that the choice made by the previous government “was a political decision.”

He discounts a rumor that the companies offered to install the system free of charge in the expectation that profits from long-distance telephone charges would make up the loss in a short time.

Kucharski said the government would entertain an offer from a telecommunications company to install a new telephone system in exchange for taking the profits from the system for a number of years.

“That would be an ideal solution for us,” he said. “Our goal is to develop a modern system as soon as possible. First, we must find the money. But as everyone in Poland knows, communication is an urgent need.”

He estimates that the cost could be as high as $300 million.

Western Restrictions

Among other problems that must be solved are Western restrictions on the export of high-technology products to Eastern Europe. Experts say the ban now includes much of the telecommunications technology in routine use in the West. For Poles and others, it is a grim reminder of how far behind the region has fallen.

For the last 40 years, in the closed-circuit economic systems of Eastern Europe, the need for communication with the West was minimized. Some theorists say the scarcity of telephones simply reflects the structure of communication in a Communist system, where information was meant to be passed on vertically, through the party chain of command, with the retarded system of communication automatically discouraging attempts to cut across the hierarchy.

For totalitarian states, limiting communication has been a means of social control, and it seems to be no accident that in hard-line East Germany, generally regarded as the most technologically advanced country in Eastern Europe, only 12% of the private homes have telephones.

In Poland, officials say there are 2.7 million telephones, with more than half of them in businesses or offices. Only about 1.8 million homes have telephones.

With bribes and carefully cultivated connections, it is possible--sometimes--for the privileged to jump to the top of the absurdly long lists of applicants for a private telephone. Such methods may succeed in the cities, but in towns and villages, where lines simply do not exist, they make no difference.

Campaign Promises

In the last year or two, as Polish society has begun to open up and the government increasingly has been forced to acknowledge its shortcomings, some politicians have campaigned for local office on promises to bring telephones to their constituents. Last year, a Communist office-seeker in Wola, an industrial suburb of Warsaw, pledged to do something about the pitiful number of 200 telephones distributed in a community of nearly 30,000. Weary of Communist promises, the electorate defeated him anyway.

In the town of Otrebusy, 20 miles west of Warsaw, Zbigniew Koguc, a prosperous plumbing and heating contractor, had no such problems. “I ran as an independent,” he says proudly. He also promised telephones. He won, and now he’s delivering.

The first new telephones will be connected, with as much ceremony as the town can muster, on Oct. 15, thus displacing the current town exchange: a patched-together military field switchboard, dating from 1924, mounted in an old army truck locked in a garage. It connects 200 lines but allows only seven conversations at a time.

“When everyone wants to use it at the same time, then no one gets through,” Koguc says.

Under his leadership, the population of Otrebusy and a neighboring village of about 3,000 people chipped in the equivalent of $18 per customer and dug their own lines, including a four-mile trunk line to the next-largest town. They put up a building to house the exchange in three weeks flat, using mostly donated materials, and got the Telecommnications Ministry to sell them an old central exchange, much refurbished, with a capacity of 1,000 lines.

‘Are Needs Are Too Great’

“With this kind of work, we can achieve a lot,” Koguc said the other day. “Society will require this kind of work, because our needs are too great just to sit and wait for someone to do it for us.”