General

Turkey's archaic telecommunications system, which had long been overloaded, received expanded domestic and international lines in the 1980s and early 1990s. Until the 1980s, more than half of Turkey's villages lacked telephone connections, and customers had to wait years to get telephones installed. In the early 1980s, authorities designed a program to eliminate the waiting list for telephones; make service available to all of the country's settlements; and install countrywide automatic dialing, a new telex system, and a connection with the European telecommunications satellite. The number of telephones increased from about 351,000 in 1966 to an estimated 7.96 million by the end of 1991.

The Turkish Radio-Television Corporation (Türkiye Radyo-Televizyon Kurumu--TRT) has flagship radio stations in Ankara and Istanbul, with subsidiary networks in fifteen other urban centres. Frequency modulation (FM) transmitters are located in ten cities, including Ankara and Istanbul. In addition to Turkish, broadcasts are made in Albanian, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Persian, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, and Urdu. Turkish television has two main channels that reach more than forty population centres. The Istanbul area has three additional channels. In early 1995, the Turkish population had some 8.8 million radios and some 10.53 million television sets.

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