Courrier des lecteurs

Posted by nicolas13 on February 28 2016, 20:24pm

Nouvelle rubrique qui me tient à cœur, je publierais chaque mois des messages de lecteurs qui participent à nous en apprendre un peu plus sur la téléphonie, et surtout sur le StarTac.

Recevant souvent des messages de lecteurs des quatre coins du monde il me semble important de partager leurs expériences qui sont d'ailleurs souvent similaires a ma propre expérience!

Tout comme moi les startac ou autres motorola les ont fait rêver mais il faut bien avouer qu'à l’époque de leur sortie peu de personne pouvait se permettre de se les offrir...

Puis avec l'âge ils sont devenus comme moi, collectionneurs de ces petits appareils simplement par plaisir et peux être un peu par frustration...

Voici le témoignage de Tiago vivant au Brésil avec qui j'ai eu le plaisir d’échanger et qui est atteint de la même passion que moi! Il nous en apprend un peu plus sur le marché des téléphones sud américains dans les années 90!

Un grand merci a lui pour ce témoignage!

Hi Nicolas,

Phones in Brazil (even land lines) were crazy expensive until 1998, when the phone companies were privatized.

The Estate owned companies kept demand way above supply. To have a phone line (land or mobile) you needed to capitalize the phone company to the amount the phone company would have to invest to add that extra line.

The idea was that you would buy stock in the phone company and with the money from the stock offer the phone company would invest in infrastructure. But there was a lot of governmental corruption so the money was just stolen and the infrastructure never came.

So people would pay US$1000-2000 and wait for years until they had a phone line. Keep in mind the minimum wage was around $100 and one would be lucky to make that much money.

The was a huge secondary market for phone lines, people would buy lines and RENT them for monthly income, also if you had property you`d sell it or rent it WITH and existing phone line because if you moved from one district to another it would take months or YEARS to move the phone line from on address to another.

The cost of a phone line in a rich district or a cell line would be US$4,000-US$6,000 in the mid 90s. Also the internet service would be ridiculously slow, unreliable and expensive, in 1997 i was paying a US$1 an hour for the internet provider, US$1.50/hr for the phone company and i`d be lucky to connect at 9600 bps, usually 4800 bps or 2400 bps, and i couldnt stay online longer than 45min, the connection would break up. I needed Getright to download a simple 40k image.

The reason for this is that my particular phone line was conected through a rotary phone central. I live in Copacabana, which was the most fashionable district in Brazil from the 1920s to the 1960s, so they brought in the first "automatic" (no operator) rotary phone central in 1926 from Belgium, because it was so "modern" at the time.

That central was not replaced until 1998, so at the time it was the oldest and most long serving rotary central in the the world - lucky me hun?

AMPS Cell phone service in Rio was crap and expensive, US$40 monthly fee and US$0,50 per minute. Having a long phone call in public was "ostentatious". We had a lot of hills so a lot of interference and "no service areas".

I told you all this so you can have a picture why the cell phone models were so expensive. Brazil has a "no import" policy, everything imported comes with a high tax, so in 1996 if you went to the US and bought and Elite for US$700 you`d have to pay 50% custom tax at the brazilian airport, so the Elite would cost US$1000, as opposed to US$1400 in a Brazilian shop.

You`d need to show the custom tax was paid otherwise the government owned phone companies would not program the line into your phone. The funny thing is, the phones sold at the shops would be smuggled corrupting custom tax officials and sold with fraudulent receipts that the phone company would accept.

When the StarTAC became popular during 1997 Motorola assembled them in Jaguariuna, Sao Paulo, with negative interest loans and tax exemptions from the BR government, you get by bribing politicians.

It was a really big market, Motorola was king, i`d say pre 1996 90% of phones were DPC 550, because everyone had the batteries and the charges and the aftermarket accessories, sometimes people upgraded to the Elite, but when the StarTAC arrived it was the ultimate status symbol.

I loved my Elite, which was new in 1996 so I didnt trade for the 8600 until mid 1998, i used it for a few months and sold it for an early digital CDMA the phone company gave me, it was that bad.

It looked like this same system as the SC 725, but i dont even know the code number.

http://www.davesat.com.br/adm/produtos/arq/395/p_1.jpg

In Feb 1999 I went to the us and i was lucky to buy the StarTAC CDMA, which had much better software than the TDMA.

I think I wrote too much... so i`ll finish with a french story. In mid 2005 Nokia was introducing the 8800 and my mother was visiting several countries in Europe, but a lot of the Nokia stores had no idea what the phone was.

At Galeries Lafayette they were lucky to find 2 examples and a japanese tourist wanted to buy both so she had to fight him. At the Paris airport she was asking for the detache refund and the french official wanted to see the phone because he could not believe a phone was 940 euros. My mom had the phone wraped in Serviette hygiénique so it would not be taxed at 50% at the brazilian airport, so she had to unwrapped it and the french official was impressed with the beauty of the phone, i dont even remember if we got the tax back.

Regards,

Tiago

les videos de Tiago avec en prime une jolie collection de téléphones mobiles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f286SkrCvkk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B39gkmVoQFw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L53eSRJrKK0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-jczWljDfc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unTr3vcqLuM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IAvHyZP8uU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvvQWmN4-hs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B39gkmVoQFw