science

Postal, telegraph and telephone service

Postal, telegraph and telephone service is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Postal, telegraph and telephone service rather than just read about it. In short: A postal, telegraph, and telephone service (or PTT) is a government agency responsible for postal mail, telegraph, and telephone services. Such monopolies existed in many countries, though not in North America, post-war Japan or Spain.

Key takeaways

Postal, telegraph and telephone service belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Postal, telegraph and telephone service to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Postal, telegraph and telephone service from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

A postal, telegraph, and telephone service (or PTT) is a government agency responsible for postal mail, telegraph, and telephone services. Such monopolies existed in many countries, though not in North America, post-war Japan or Spain. Many PTTs have been partially or completely privatised in recent years, though a few, such as Posta ve Telgraf Teşkilatı of Turkey, Myanma Posts and Telecommunications of Myanmar and Tusass of Greenland, continue to remain wholly government-owned. In many of said privatisations, the privatised corporation was completely renamed, such as KPN in the Netherlands, Orange in France (+ Orange Polska in Poland), BT Group in the United Kingdom, Eir in the Republic of Ireland, Swisscom in Switzerland, Telstra in Australia, Spark in New Zealand, Proximus Group in Belgium, A1 Telekom Austria Group in Austria, TDC Group in Denmark, Telia Company in Sweden and Finland, Telenor in Norway, Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan and Singtel in Singapore; whereas in others, the name of the privatised corporation has been only slightly modified, such as Telkom Indonesia in Indonesia, Telekom Malaysia in Malaysia, Kosovo Telecom in Kosovo, Deutsche Telekom in Germany (+ Hrvatski Telekom in Croatia and Telekom Romania Mobile in Romania), Altice Portugal in Portugal, KT in South Korea, Post Luxembourg in Luxembourg and, Síminn in Iceland.

Monopoly service In countries that had a PTT unit of government, typically the vast majority of forms of distribution of information fell under the auspices of the PTT, whether that be the delivery of printed publications and individual letters in the postal mail, the transmission of telephonic audio, or the transmission of telegraphic on-off signals, and in some countries, the broadcast of one-way (audio) radio and (audio-video) television signals. In many countries with a current or former PTT, the PTT was also responsible for the manufacture and standardisation of telephone equipment. Often the presence of a single PTT in a country implied a single monolithic approach to the distribution of information in that country, which as an advantage permitted efficient deployment of a single national standard for each topic instead of ongoing debate about competing ideas, but which as a disadvantage typically stifled alternative ideas from emerging once a legacy implementation had been widely deployed.

Countries without a PTT In North America, instead of a PTT there was the private monopoly Bell System (for the US)/Bell Canada (dominant ILEC in Ontario, Quebec and (historically) parts of what is now Nunavut; competes with other fixed-line carriers in the rest of Canada) responsible for telecommunications and a separate federally run US Postal Service/Canada Post for mail delivery. The United States also has several private postal companies, including UPS and FedEx. Post-war Japan also had a rather similar structure as North America with the partially-state-owned Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT; privatized in 1985 but the government still have a controlling stake) having a monopoly on fixed-line telecoms, with the separate government-run but publicly traded Japan Post responsible for mail delivery (prior to World War II, Japan did had a postal, telegraph and telephone service under the Ministry of Communications); as did Spain with Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España (CTNE; privatized in 1997) having a monopoly on fixed-line telecoms, with the separate state-owned Correos de España responsible for mail delivery.

Mixed service Portugal, until 1968, had a mixture, with a private telecom operator in Lisbon and Porto (named APT – Anglo-Portuguese Telephone Company) another private company in charge of connections with and between colonies and with the rest of the world (CPRM – Companhia Portuguesa de Rádio Marconi) and Correios, Telefones e Telégrafos, a public company, as the PTT agency and owner of the telephone system in the rest of the country (including the former colonies); that year, APT was nationalised and became Telefones de Lisboa e Porto (TLP). CTT still controls postal services in Portugal, while Telecom Portugal was spun out in 1992 and later merged into Portugal Telecom in 1994 (with CPRM becoming a subsidiary and later being absorbed in 2002); it is privatised and subject to competition.

See also European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations

Further reading OECD, Universal Service and Rate Restructuring in Telecommunications, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Publishing, 1991. ISBN 92-64-13497-2

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Postal, telegraph and telephone service

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Postal, telegraph and telephone service claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Postal, telegraph and telephone service before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Postal, telegraph and telephone service ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Postal, telegraph and telephone service

In research: Postal, telegraph and telephone service appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Postal, telegraph and telephone service in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Postal, telegraph and telephone service is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Government agencies by type, Postal organizations, Telecommunications economics, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Postal, telegraph and telephone service outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Postal, telegraph and telephone service in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Postal, telegraph and telephone service means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Postal, telegraph and telephone service out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Postal, telegraph and telephone service in simple terms?

Why does Postal, telegraph and telephone service matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Postal, telegraph and telephone service?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Postal, telegraph and telephone service.