EUROPE Increased interest in telephone communication has been mani fest in Europe, also, since the War. Particular attention has been directed to the extension and improvement of long distance facilities, especially as regards the circuits linking up the various countries on the Continent. Much of the impressive progress that has been made in international telephone communication on the continent of Europe since the war may be attributed to the activities of the International Consulting Committee on Long Distance Telephone Communication. This committee was formed as a result of an international conference at Paris in 1923, at which delegates from Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain and Switzerland assembled at the invitation of the French Post, Telegraph and Telephone Administration. This conference proposed that a Consulting Committee should be formed which should undertake to unify as far as possible the practices of the various European telephone administrations bearing on inter national telephone communication, and should gather statistics and prepare technical recommendations to be submitted to the telephone authorities of the participating countries. Nineteen nations accepted the recommendations of the Paris conference of 1923 and their delegates assembled at Paris the following year to form the International Consulting Committee for Long Dis tance Telephone Communication. A constitution was prepared and a sub-committee appointed to prepare the agenda for the next conference. The recommendations of the preliminary con ference were considered and some additional matters were dis cussed, particularly a proposal for a standard transmission unit and proposals relating to rates for international messages.
In 1925 the Consulting Committee held its second meeting, at which representatives of European telephone manufacturers were present. Transmission and inductive interference problems were added to the subjects to be studied. A number of proposals toward bringing the work of the committee into affiliation with similar activities of the League of Nations were rejected owing largely to the fact that Germany, which occupies a strategic position in regard to the system of international telephone communication on the Continent, was not at that time a member of the League.
Subsequently the Consulting Committee has adopted the Inter national Telegraph Regulation, as it was amended by the Inter national Telegraph Conference of 1925, as a guide in its activities. Much has since been done in way of developing recommended standards of service and instructions for the operation of interna tional circuits. Engineering problems in particular have received exhaustive consideration and much attention has been given to the question of suitable rates and classes of service. Further recogni tion of the importance of long distance telephony was accorded by resolutions which were adopted at the 1925 Congress of the International Chamber of Commerce at Brussels, and at the later conventions of the same organization.
This recognition of the importance of long distance telephone communication, supplemented by the concrete recommendations of the International Consulting Committee, has helped to stimu late the European telephone administrations to take advantage of recent improvements in telephone equipment, notably as regards the increased efficiency of long distance telephone cables made possible by loading, the development of the vacuum tube repeater and other advances in the telephone art. Long distance telephone cables have been extensively introduced recently in Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland.
European Long Distance Cables. Austria.—The first long distance cable from Vienna to Passau on the German frontier was finished early in 1927, covering a distance of 17o miles and con taining 114 circuits. Austria has a total of nearly i,000 miles of long distance telephone cable and at the completion of present plans this mileage will be greatly increased.