Deutsche Telekom discontinues information: No more lines at 11833

Deutsche Telekom will discontinue its directory assistance service on December 1, 2024. The company had already announced this last May, and now the step is being taken. This marks the end of an era, as the "lady from the exchange" has been an authority since the beginning of telephony at the end of the 19th century. This was also because the connections in the local exchanges had to be made using cables plugged in by hand. Callers always ended up with an operator, direct dialing only became established later.

Due to the importance of an information service, the former number 118 was also one of the three-digit speed dial numbers alongside the emergency numbers 110 and 112. With the privatization of the telephony market in the 1990s, 118XX was defined as the number range with which directory assistance services of all kinds could be offered. Telekom was given the 11833, which had been used until then, and advertised it heavily, including with television commercials, as did the private providers. "You'll get help" was the slogan of the largest private provider with the number 11880, presented by Verona Feldbusch.

A peak of 550 million calls per year

This also led to the highest demand in the mid-1990s. According to Telekom, the record was set in 1995 with 550 million calls to directory assistance, since then, demand has fallen by 20 percent annually. In 2023, however, there are said to have been around 2 million calls. The service is therefore no longer cost-covering. Most recently, the service was mainly handled by a call center in Pasewalk, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. According to a recent report by Deutschlandfunk, most of the employees are retiring.

Forty people are still employed, at its peak around 5,000 people worked for Deutsche Telekom for the service, which in its heyday was a source of information on all kinds of topics. In the beginning, telephone directories were used, but later microfilms and finally computers were added. Just like directory assistance itself, telephone directory CDs were good business for numerous providers in the 1990s. Today, this has largely been replaced by the Internet, with the result that Deutsche Telekom also believes that the service has "fallen out of time."

Dozens of other providers remain

The announcement of the end of the Telekom directory assistance service was already met with criticism, including from the VdK social association. Older and poor people could not use or afford a smartphone, and therefore could not easily use internet search engines to find numbers. However, Deutsche Telekom's directory assistance is not the only service: the Federal Network Agency lists several dozen other directory assistance services in its current list of providers.

Anyone who wants to call 11833 today for nostalgic reasons should know that each call costs 1.99 euros from a landline, and usually more from a mobile phone. When the Bundespost still had a telephone monopoly in the 1980s, this was a fee unit that cost 20 pfennigs for a long time. With domestic directory inquiries under 11833, international directory enquiries (formerly 11834) and the wake-up service, which was also available under 11833, were discontinued. Incidentally, for many years it was not a friendly lady who called, but a recorded male voice.

(nie)