Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!bellcore!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: sandy47@ucsco.ucsc.edu (90784000) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Telephony in Belgium Message-ID: Date: 20 Sep 89 09:00:50 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Reply-To: sandy47@ucsco.ucsc.edu Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz Lines: 28 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 390, message 3 of 7 I was stationed in The Netherlands (Maastricht) in the US Air Force during 1966-1969 as part of a radio relay maintenance team. We had two microwave sites in Germany, two in The Netherlands, and two in Belgium, in addition to a maintenance site at Roclenge sur Geer, Belgium. We constantly used the telephone system to contact all six sites from Belgium and I learned inter- national dialing early in life. It was less than 15 minutes driving between the Maastricht site (located in a Dutch PTT tower) to the maintenance site in Belgium, but was an international call. What made it particularly bad was that our site was located on the dividing line between the Flemish (Dutch) and Walloon (French) speaking sections of Belgium. Telephone maintenance was all but impossible and winter conditions at our sites in the Ardenne Mountains made it worse. We had all of the sites linked by HF radio as a backup, but often we would drive to Maastricht across the border to use the microwave communications channels connecting the sites to make reliable contact! Our customers were all military as part of the Allied Forces Central Europe (AFCENT) network and we essentially duplicated the existing HF/VHF radio links and PTT/RTT networks. As I was leaving Europe in 1969, satellite networks were taking over much of the communications requirements. Belgium had to be one of the more interesting countries in Europe at that time, since they were just instituting vehicle drivers licenses in 1969 (as I recall) and most drivers were grandfathered into the system. The others had to either take a written exam _or_ a road test! Belgium also had one of the highest accident rates in Europe then. Thanks for the reminder!