Hungarians Light Up the Phones

Auto mechanic Andras Floris enjoys a frothy beer during midday breaks at the Golf Pub, a popular way station in this lazy island village about 25 miles upriver from Budapest, the Hungarian capital.

Like many regulars, he also enjoys using the telephone, a flashy red model that proprietor Agnes Bode serves up for about 4 cents a minute. But Floris keeps his calls simple. When he has something weighty to say, he prefers the cellular phone back at the garage.

“It is more popular to use the mobile phones because they can’t be tapped,” said Floris, 37, his green overalls soiled from a morning repair job. “It wasn’t so long ago in this country when everybody was being listened to.”

Come this Christmas, Kisoroszi will celebrate its third anniversary of residential telephone service, a milestone for the Danube River hamlet’s 318 customers and a telling example of the telephone revolution sweeping the former Eastern Bloc.

More than 1 million fixed lines have been installed in Hungary since 1993, nearly wiping out a 13-year waiting list and introducing phone service to hundreds of villages long dependent on the written word or a rare public phone line for the simplest of long-distance communications. At the same time, 520,000 cellular subscribers have signed up, making Hungarians the best-connected Europeans behind the erstwhile Iron Curtain. Together, the new fixed and wireless installations have doubled the number of Hungarian phone customers in just four years.

“My telephone has become my connection to the world,” said Gizi Tobias, 67, a widow who lived her first 65 years in Kisoroszi sans phone. “I can’t imagine life without it.”

But in Hungary and other onetime Communist countries, the new love affair with phones has come fast but not unconditionally. Old Communist-bred phobias and routines are dying hard--particularly those about Big Brother’s big ears--while cellular technologies have so liberated mobile callers that many people are crying out for limits or at least rules of common decency.

“We tend to look at these changes from a technological point of view, but there is a lot of human behavior involved,” said Douglas Smith, telecommunications analyst for Salomon Bros. in London. “The mobile phone in many ways symbolizes Western life and Western business, while the poor-quality fixed-line networks still represent the old Communist economy and way of life.”

No one suggests that the old times are back, when totalitarian authorities carefully controlled telephone availability as a means of repression. But still fresh are memories of suspicious rattles on the lines and, in some cases, an accusatory voice breaking into conversations.

During martial law in Poland in the early 1980s, a tape-recorded message--rozmowa kontrolowana--openly reminded callers that their remarks were being monitored.

And in one of the best-documented cases of eavesdropping, transcripts of telephone calls were submitted as evidence against Lech Walesa in a criminal trial in 1987. During one conversation, the Solidarity union leader quickly cut off an interview with a Western journalist as state militia officers stormed his apartment.

“Come quick! Look at how they’re pushing and shoving. Look!” Walesa’s secretary can be heard shouting in the background, according to a government transcript excerpted in Walesa’s autobiography.

A Crucial Link to the Outside World

Get Tobias talking about her new tabletop gadget and it quickly becomes apparent what a momentous event it was that Christmas in 1994 when a thick cable was stretched down her dusty road in newly democratic Kisoroszi. All alone with no family nearby, Tobias talks to her two sisters every week. When high water disrupts ferry service to the mainland, she reports, the phone is her only lifeline.

But no matter how wonderful it has been, she swiftly reminds a visitor, some subjects are strictly off-limits, even in the solitude of her tidy home.

“We have a saying in Hungarian: ‘It is not a topic for the telephone,’ ” she explained with a wagging finger. “Every family has certain secrets that should remain private. I am not saying anyone is listening, but you never really know, do you?”

Tibor Kecskes, a repairman since 1963 for Matav--the main Hungarian telephone company, which is now owned in part by Chicago-based Ameritech Corp. and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom--said many Hungarians pick up the receiver with similar reservations. If it is not Big Brother listening in, then perhaps it’s a nosy central operator, a business competitor or, even worse, someone from the country’s growing criminal underworld, the tele-phobes say.

“When I was younger, we had an expression: ‘The enemy can hear you,’ ” said Kecskes, conducting a diagnostic test on one of Kisoroszi’s three pay phones. “Sure, things have changed, but the thinking is an outcome of 40 years of communism.”

Officials at Matav would not answer questions about wiretapping or almost anything having to do with the firm’s $2.7-billion investment program because the Wunderkind of East European phone companies is positioning itself to become the region’s first national telecom operator listed on the New York Stock Exchange. But officials with the Hungarian Ministry of Transportation, Telecommunications and Water Management, which oversees Matav’s operations, dismiss such fears as unfounded and paranoid.

“It is plain stupidity if someone believes his phone is tapped these days,” said Kalman Takacs, the ministry’s general director for telecommunications.

George F. Battistig, technical advisor to the ministry, said the sheer volume of telephone lines in Hungary--about 2.6 million and growing in a country of 10.3 million people--makes widespread eavesdropping impractical. Even so, he conceded, “It is a part of our new freedom that everyone has a right to be afraid.”

Although it is impossible to calculate, telecommunications analysts believe such lingering tele-phobia has helped boost the popularity of cellular phones in Hungary and throughout the former Eastern Bloc, though no one doubts the higher-quality fixed lines--now being installed with the latest digital and fiber-optic technology--will remain in high demand.

Hungarian mobile phone subscribers account for one-third of mobile customers in Central and Eastern Europe, with market penetration approaching levels in France, Belgium and Greece.

Analog mobile systems, which arrived on the market in the early 1990s, can be easily monitored with the help of a $300 scanner. But the latest--and vastly more popular--digital versions are impossible to track without the most sophisticated technology.

“The national secrets department isn’t so happy with our success,” said Andras Sugar, the all-smiles general manager of Westel 900, one of Hungary’s booming digital mobile phone operators, which is investing $350 million in its expanding network.

Eavesdropping on a General’s Call

In Poland, another mushrooming Central European phone market, Communist-era suspicion has been nurtured by democratic-era scandal. Cellular phone operators say there was a mass defection from analog to digital phones due to a sensational incident involving the tapping of the Polish chief of staff’s analog phone by Polish military counterintelligence. The general had been discussing a mundane military equipment sale but was livid to learn his privacy had been invaded.

Robert Niczewski, public relations manager for Era GSM, one of Poland’s digital operators, said the scandal became an instant telephone legend--and a continuous source of new customers for digital mobile phone companies. If they can eavesdrop on the country’s top military official, customers ask, then is anybody safe?

“There were stories circulating that the Polish mafia switched to GSM because of the affair,” Niczewski said. “And it is true. All kinds of people suddenly became very concerned about the security of their conversations.”

Although rates have dropped dramatically, it is still a relative luxury to use a mobile phone in Central and Eastern Europe. In Budapest, a fixed-line customer typically pays $7 in monthly fees and 4 cents a minute for local daytime calls. By comparison, basic service for an analog mobile phone costs about $12 monthly and 25 cents a minute, while the cheapest digital mobile phone goes for about $9 monthly and 50 cents a minute. In Hungary, the per capita income is only $5,700 a year.

Please Don’t Call During Sunday Mass

Still, whether for privacy, prestige or simple convenience, the rush to mobile phones has become so maddening in Hungary that Westel 900 recently issued a Ten Commandments of mobile phone etiquette to head off persistent complaints about customer incivility.

The brochure reminds callers not to ring up during Sunday Mass, at the cemetery or in the quiet wards of hospitals. It also makes the seemingly obvious--but often unheeded--suggestion not to talk on the phone while at the movies. In Poland, a moviegoer was hospitalized after a surly mobile phone owner beat him up for making a fuss about a ringing phone.

“I support those who want to restrict using phones in public places. It can be nasty,” said Sugar, who attributes the mobile tele-mania to increasingly affordable rates and a natural Hungarian gift for gab. “When something is wrong, we have to say it is wrong, even if it costs us money.”

At the highbrow Kempinski Hotel Corvinus in Budapest, cellular phone customers have become so disruptive that management has banned handsets from the popular lobby restaurant, where it was not unusual to spot a diner juggling two conversations, a green salad and a glass of wine.

Scores of other businesses across Hungary also have added cellular phones to the list of “DO NOTs” posted on front windows, relegating one of the world’s most popular new technologies to the company of melting ice cream cones and drooling dogs.

“Not very long ago, nobody had a phone in Hungary, so it seems everyone has gone out and got a mobile phone overnight,” said Ildiko Dudas, spokeswoman for the Kempinski. “People are using them everywhere, in public transit, at the theater, just walking down the street. We thought our restaurant should be a place to dine and not work on the telephone.”

But the restrictions have been a hard sell. As in Western Europe, the mobile phone has become a status symbol in Hungary and other former Eastern Bloc countries, particularly among business-people and public officials. A phone unseen, the adage goes, is no phone indeed.

In the early 1990s, sociologists say, mobile phones were mostly associated with the criminal underworld and shady characters in get-rich-quick schemes, derisively labeled as “the one brain cell group.”

But as services became less costly, the image became more populist, particularly among young people who now consider mobile phones an essential tool of commerce.

Warsaw University sociologist Aleksander Manterys said the mobile phone has evolved into an expression of freedom for the region’s first democratic generation--and an implicit rejection of overbearing government symbolized by largely state-monopolized fixed telephone services.

“We want to express our freedom, and it makes us feel free when we can communicate whenever and wherever we want,” Manterys said.

But many Central and East Europeans are learning that this new freedom can be stifling, especially when it becomes more and more difficult to “go off line.” Companies now routinely require employees to carry their mobile phones on weekends and holidays so they are never more than a call away from the office.

“The natural boundary between one’s public and private life is disappearing,” Manterys said. “This poses a whole new set of dangers for the new mobile phone generation. The question becomes: ‘Do we really want to follow the pattern of the West in this regard?’ ”

For Pal Ujvary, a retired teacher and mayor of Kisoroszi, the answer is easy. As much as he appreciates the telephone revolution that has brought the world to his living room, he still reaches for his bicycle, not the telephone, when he wants to talk to a constituent.

Maybe, Ujvary said, it is just an old habit from the days when Kisoroszi had only seven phone lines, mostly reserved for privileged or well-connected people. Or maybe, he said, it is the warmth of a friendly handshake and a shared cup of coffee that even the most modern telephone exchange has yet to duplicate.