International Telephone Calls: Global and Regional Patterns (original) (raw)
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Telecommunication traffic: global disparities and international flows
Bulletin of Geography Socio Economic Series, 2014
New information and communication technologies (ICTs) have shrunk geographical space and time more than ever. But do people fully use the opportunities provided by the newest ICTs? How intensively do they communicate with each other on the international level? And what are the global disparities in the level of telecommunicativeness and international communicative openness? To answer these questions a study of global telecommunication traffic and the specificity of its spatial organisation has been undertaken based on the official statistics on different types of ICT traffic (postal service, fixed telephone, mobile phone and the Internet) over the last two decades. Indicators in the sphere of telecommunicativeness and international communicative openness are presented. This study expands the understanding of international integration and globalisation processes in their communication aspects.
SPATIAL INTERACTION MODELS OF INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATION FLOWS 1
Despite the growing role of international telecommunications in the new global economy, the spatial structure of these flows, their socio-economic determinants, and their relationships with other international flows are not very well understood. This research makes use of a sample of 4137 country-to-country annual telephone flows (minutes of conversation) for the year 1995, involving 103 origin and 204 destination countries. This sample, obtained from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), provides an opportunity for more comprehensive analyses and modeling than those in past related studies, where generally only one originating country is involved. These data are matched with country-to-country trade flows from the IMF, and country-level telecommunication (e.g., main lines, Internet hosts), socio-demographic, and economic variables obtained from the ITU, the UN Statistical Yearbook, and the CIA World Factbook. Various spatial interaction models are then estimated, involving several variables characterizing the origin and destination countries, great-circle distance, spatial contiguity, commonalities in language and religion, political and former colonial relationships, membership in special trade groups, and actual trade flows. In addition, intervening opportunities and competing destination variables are introduced into the model to test the effects of the international spatial structure on telephone flows. The results underscore the critical role of a country's (1) level of telecommunication equipment, (2) size of the business sector, (3) exports and imports, and (4) touristic attraction. The importance of distance, contiguity, commonalities in language and religion, and membership in culturally homogeneous regions and trade groups, is confirmed, as is the complex role of spatial structure. Among the most intriguing results is the empirical confirmation that electronic mail via the Internet may substitute for international telephone flows.
Global Telephony in the Age of the Internet
This paper offers an overview of the massive regulatory, technological, and social changes that have reshaped the world's telephony markets since the rise of the internet. It begins by examining how neoliberalism has reworked the world's telecommunications markets, and then turns to the global wave of deregulation that this transformation has entailed. It then focuses on the geographies of mobile or cellular telephony, which exceeds traditional landlines by a factor of 10 and is having substantial impacts, particularly in the developing world. The fourth part delves into the rapidly expanding domain of Voice Over Internet (VOIP) telephony such as Skype, which comprises more than a quarter of the world's telephone traffic.
1992
The explosion of activities and requirements associated with the production, processing and transfer of information is increasingly being matched by a profileration and diversification of new telecommunication media for transmitting information, including text processing and transmission services such as facsimile transmission, videotex, teleconference services, electronic mail etc. Nevertheless, the telephone is still - by far - the most important telecommunication service. The paper results from ESF-research undertaken within the Network on European Communication and Transport Activity Research (NECTAR) and relates to telephone communication undertaken for the Netherlands by Rietveld and Jansen (1990) and Switzerland by Rossera (1990). The current study focuses on the Austrian case and relies on data measured by the Austrian PTT in 1991, in terms of erlangs, an internationally widely used and reliable measure of telecommunication contact intensity. The data refer to the total tele...
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The globalization of telecommunicative ties between nations is studied from a heterogenization perspective. A theoretical model inspired by Appadurai’s “disjuncture hypothesis,” which stipulates that global flows of communication are multidimensional and reinforce regional/local identities, is tested empirically on an international voice traffic dataset. Spatial-statistical measures (global and local versions of Moran’s I) indicate that countries that share the same linguistic (English, Spanish, or French) or civilizational (Catholic, Protestant, and Buddhist–Hindu) background are more likely to be each other’s “telecommunicative neighbors” and that this tendency has increased over time (1989–1999).
Emerging patterns in telematic flows among European countries and peculiarities of the Italian case
in “Networks and Communications Studies/NETCOM”, volume 15, n.1-2, 2001, pp.81-99, 2001
The development of the Internet in Europe has witnessed extraordinary and rapid growth over the last few years. If, in general terms, this phenomenon is common among many countries it is also true that the rhythm of Internet penetration has nonetheless been quite different. This difference is even more pronounced when the analysis is extended beyond the EU Member States to Europe in its larger context, i.e. the composite regional macroeconomic system that, for cultural and commercial reasons, joins countries in an intense and significant relationship (including, in particular, the EFTA countries, Turkey and some East European countries). The paper seeks to verify whether -and to what degree -the relationships that currently exist on the Internet among these countries are such that they show the prerequisites of a network in which it is possible to identify a series of ties that define a clear hierarchical structure to this space. In conclusion the Italian case, which due to the disparities in the regional (north and central vs. south) diffusion of the phenomenon presents important peculiarities, will be dealt with in depth. The aim is to identify the causes and evaluate whether the liberalisation processes that are presently occurring in the telecommunications sector will, in future, result in a reduction or in a worsening of this national anomaly.
Journal of World-Systems Research, 1996
This paper extends the theoretical arguments of the world-systems perspective to the emerging post-industrial society. Using survey data gathered by AT&T and published in the World's Telephones (1978-1990) and data gathered by the International Institute of Communication and published in TeleGeography (1991-1992), this paper describes the process of globalization by examining the changes in the international telecommunications network from 1978 to 1992. Based on network analysis, the results indicate that the system was relatively stable over this time period. In the late 1970s, the system was composed of a number of sub-groups. By 1980, it had coalesced into a single group with the United States and the other western economic powers at the center and the Eastern block and less developed countries in the periphery. Over time, the network slowly became denser, more centralized and more highly integrated. During the 1980s, the newly industrialized countries (NICs) of East Asia and...
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This research explores the role of telecommunicative globalization in bridging world political and economic divides. Current approaches define globalization primarily in terms of increased density of network ties between nations, a perspective the present article extends into a more comprehensive framework. Exchange and balance theories are combined into a multitheoretical, multilevel model consisting of hypotheses regarding the mutuality, transitivity, and cyclicality of telephonic flows between nations that differed in economic and democratic attributes in 1989 and 1999. Statistical p* procedures demonstrate that tendencies toward mutuality and transitivity in the world telecommunications network have significantly increased between 1989 and 1999. These findings hold both for telecommunication flows among a full set of 110 nations of the world and for links between rich and poor and democratic and nondemocratic nations. The article concludes by examining implications of these results for network globalization theories.
Cost shifting in international telephone calls between US and African countries
Journal of Development Economics, 2002
This paper uses a two-equation model, panel data from African countries during the 1992–1996 period and a dynamic panel estimator to investigate cost shifting in international telephone calls between these African countries and the US. Using call minutes as the dependent variable, we find that callers in African countries engage in cost shifting while their US counterparts do not. We
Demand for international telephone services between US and Africa
Information Economics and Policy, 1999
This paper uses a two-equation dynamic simultaneous equation model that accounts for call externality and arbitrage, and a dynamic panel estimator to investigate the demand for international telephone calls between the US and African countries. Using panel data from 45 African countries over the 1992–1996 period, we find that the demand for telephone calls from African countries to the US