The Argentinian Phone System
by Derneval
My article about the Brazilian phone system made such an impression (I even saw a rewritten/pirated version of it in a great U.S. Internet magazine) that I decided to go on and tell a few things about Argentina's phone system.
Although I do not live there, Argentina and Brazil border each other and people are fond of saying that they are our future (meaning what happens in Argentina sooner or later happens in Brazil, maybe differently, but it happens).
To write this article I talked to Argentine phreakers and two Argentine women and read a bunch of newspaper articles, some pieces I gathered from Argentine hacker zines, and a book about their hacking. There might be an error here and there. Sorry. But the data I gathered is much more strange than the Brazilian phone system.
Their phone system a few years ago was a little worse. For starters, Argentine businessmen didn't use phones to accomplish business. It was a state monopoly, just like Brazil's, and it was called ENTel. The waiting time for the installation of a new phone line could amount to ten years and any problems with the line could take weeks to be solved.
The switches were mostly mechanical and, after lifting the receiver, it could take a few seconds before one could start punching numbers. Although the country had its own X.25 network (ARPAC), the system was so old and chaotic, its infrastructure was near collapse by 1989. If anyone remembers those days, Argentina's economy made some world headlines because of its major problems, the government, to sanitize the economy, put everything up for sale.
In the case of the phone system, to ease things, it was declared that they were giving up any thought of future control over the service, including any thought of taxing the services.
So what happened? A state monopoly was replaced by a double-monopoly of two companies: Telecom Argentina (I think it's Dutch-owned) and Telefónica de Argentina (mix of French, Spanish, and Italian money).
The capital, Buenos Aires, was divided fifty-fifty between the two of them. The cost of a phone line dropped to something like U.S. $400. And suddenly everybody who wanted a phone line could have one. Magic? No. The phone system stayed just the same for a while, but the billing of a single line was raised to a minimum of U.S. $200 a month. (It's considered lack of manners in Argentine families to visit and ask if you can use the phone.)
So, many people who already had their phones installed by the old system simply could not afford this and they re-turned their lines. That was the magic. Another interesting fact is that a cell phone line is free, but the billing is a bit higher.
I got this info from an Argentine teacher who was thrilled with the Internet. Her two kids also wanted net access. She told me that unfortunately her bank account wasn't big enough for them both. A phone line is there only for receiving calls and emergencies.
To give an idea of how the billing works, a call 500 kilometers away is billed the same way as a foreign call. And the price for a foreign phone call is damn expensive. So, many people and businesses started using call-back systems in order to call foreign. What is that? You call a company in the U.S., it calls you back and you can call anywhere you want at rates 50 percent cheaper. It was quite a hit, so much that the double-monopoly counter-attacked by raising the price of local calls (between 35 to 57 percent depending on the time of the day).
People in Argentina were so outraged that they had a phone protest in February of 1997. It was called "Telefonazo" or "Apagon Telefonico." In the whole country, between 12:45 and 13:00 hs, no call was made. Those who did not have phone lines made noise with whatever was available. The opposition to this price increase was so big that a judge was said to have reversed the thing. But I heard no more about that. Argentina's phone system was seen in Brazil as a reason why things should not change there.
Argentina's first private satellite, Nahuel 1A, was also the subject of some controversy. Launched by a French company, it generated a lot of complaints from the United States, because it was entering into other countries' areas of exploration. The fact that Argentina's market for satellite service excludes foreign companies was also reason for some noise.
Enough horror stories... What is it like for the common citizen to make a phone call?
The service is improving but, as one might easily guess, there's a culture for phreaking there, with ezines showing recipes for "tango boxes" and things to fool billing services. During the 1980s, people used dial-ups through the ARPAC to access the United States. It was quite easy because in those days, the guys at the phone company were busier trying to get things fixed than securing things.
Also, the companies like Telenet that used the service issued passwords that could not be changed fast. One stolen password could last months before the account was closed. The bill would be paid, of course, by the guy or company who suffered the loss. Later on, as security increased and modem speeds rose, the phreaker scene there changed to blue boxing.
France was the favorite of Argentina's underground. Once in a while, however, it was said that a phreaker would receive a bill for all the calls he made. But that was an exception since there were people who would get a separate phone line just for phreaking. Some phreakers would disconnect phone lines at random and use them to call foreign.
Right now, since part of the phone system is of Dutch design, Dutch boxes are being used. There was even a Spanish site with complete information about how to hack the chips for Argentine cards.
When I went there (January 1997), a phreaker showed me one completed but didn't let me take a picture of it. It looked like one I saw in a past issue of 2600. With this double-monopoly by foreign companies, it's a sure thing that the country will have all modern achievements of phone systems everywhere.
It's a pity that not everybody will have the money to use them.