Fixed Line Services
In the 1980s there was a shortage of local line capacity on the existing crossbar exchange, which itself had replaced the relay and Strowger switch exchanges and a modern digital System/X switch was installed.
Cable and Wireless, who provided international circuits installed a satellite earth station which made International Subscriber Dialling possible.
When the frontier with Spain was re-opened, telephone and telex circuits cut by General Franco were re-established. Subsequently, fibre links into the FLAG cable system (which had a landing point in Estepona, about 50 km from Gibraltar) were established and along with microwave links to Morocco giving Gibraltar a resilient communications infrastructure. Gibtelecom is also a partner in the EIG cable system, which will have a landing point in Gibraltar.
Provision for Local Loop Unbundling was introduced in Gibraltar, under the 2006 Communications Act, similar to the UK's 2003 Communications Act. Earlier in December 2005, the European Commission initiated the second stage of infringement proceedings against the British Government relating to Gibraltar’s failure to transpose five European Union directives on electronic communications, but these were closed after the relevant legislation was passed into law by the House of Assembly in June 2006.
Gibtelecom numbers are now eight digits beginning with 200 and a second operator CTS Gibraltar Limited has announced it will be providing fixed line services beginning with the prefix 216.
Read more about this topic: Communications In Gibraltar
Famous quotes containing the words fixed, line and/or services:
“It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of mindlessness. The fixed is a Mason jar, and we can’t beat it open. ...The fixed is a world without fire--dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark. It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“What comes over a man, is it soul or mind
That to no limits and bounds he can stay confined?
You would say his ambition was to extend the reach
Clear to the Arctic of every living kind.
Why is his nature forever so hard to teach
That though there is no fixed line between wrong and right,
There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed?”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Working women today are trying to achieve in the work world what men have achieved all along—but men have always had the help of a woman at home who took care of all the other details of living! Today the working woman is also that woman at home, and without support services in the workplace and a respect for the work women do within and outside the home, the attempt to do both is taking its toll—on women, on men, and on our children.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)