Traffic
In 1992 the people of the planet Earth spent a total of 40 billion minutes on the phone. To be more exact, they spent 40 billion minutes (or 76,000 years) sending information over telephone lines: voices, faxes, e-mail, and plain old data. But for most of those billions of telephone-minutes only the caller paid for the connection, even though both a caller and a callee benefited from a conversation.
The asymmetrical nature of communication costs are reflected in this global map of telegeography for 1992. The red-colored areas denote countries that make more calls than they receive (thus incurring a deficit in the global telecommunications cost balance). The blue denotes countries with more incoming than outgoing calls (a surplus); yellow-colored countries have a balance (outgoing and incoming traffic with less than a 10 percent difference); uncolored areas mean there is no data.
The United States ran a deficit by initiating (and paying for) 3 billion more minutes of telecommunications than it received. Other deficit sponsors of outgoing calls were Germany and Saudi Arabia (with many guest workers), Switzerland (where fully 5 percent of all phone calls are international connections), and Japan.
An analysis of international phone usage suggests that social calls last longer than business (or "instrumental") calls by a factor of ten - 20 to 30 minutes talking to Aunt Maria compared with 2 to 3 minutes communicating to Abdul on the factory floor.
Gregory Staple, editor of the monograph TeleGeography, from which this map is adapted, suggests that the huge telecommunication deficit of the US should be considered part of its service environment, and a bargain in the new information economics.
ELECTRIC WORD
Telegeography The Balance of Global Telecommunications Electronic Paperbacks
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