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:
“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“I said: “A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
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To thee a woman’s services are due.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)