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Albania
Telecommunications
Until 1990 Albania was one of the world's most isolated and controlled
countries, and installation and maintenance of a modern system
of international and domestic telecommunications was precluded.
Callers previously needed operator assistance even to make domestic
long-distance calls. Albania's telephone density was the lowest
in Europe, at 1.4 units for every 100 inhabitants. Tiranė accounted
for about 13,000 of the country's 42,000 direct lines; Durrės,
the main port city, ranked second with 2,000 lines; the rest were
concentrated in Shkodėr, Elbasan, Vlorė, Gjirokastėr, and other
towns. At one time, each village had a telephone but during the
land redistribution of the early 1990s peasants knocked out service
to about 1,000 villages by removing telephone wire for fencing.
Most of Albania's telephones were obsolete, low-quality East European
models, some dating from the 1940s; workers at a Tiranė factory
assembled a small number of telephones from Italian parts. In
the early 1990s, Albania had only 240 microwave circuits to Italy
and 180 to Greece carrying international calls. The Albanian telephone
company had also installed two U-20 Italtel digital exchanges.
The exchange in Tiranė handled international, national, and local
calls; the Durrės exchange handled only local calls. Two United
States firms handled direct-dial calls from the United States
to Tiranė.
The communist regime used radio and television for propaganda
purposes. In 1992 the Albanian government owned and operated seventeen
AM radio stations and one FM station that broadcast two national
programs and various regional and local programs. An estimated
514,000 Albanians had radio receivers in 1987, according to the
United States government. Nine television stations, also controlled
by the communist regime, broadcast to the approximately 255,000
television sets owned by Albanians in 1987. Although the regime
gave minimal support to domestic communications, it provided for
an extensive external shortwave and medium-wave system. Programs
were broadcast in eight foreign languages, in addition to Albanian,
and reached Africa, the Middle East, North America, South America,
and Europe. Albania's external broadcast service was one of the
largest such services in the world. The programming was heavily
propagandist, according to Western observers.
Data as of April 1992
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