The judgment is the consequence of “the regular and significant decrease” of the number of calls at 3699.
Le Monde with AFP
The speaking clock, the first automated system in the world of the genre, intended to give the French legal time via a telephone call, will be arrested on 1 er July 2022, announced on Tuesday May 3 , Orange.
Accessible from all over the national territory via 3699, this service “being part of the French industrial heritage”, according to Orange, cost 1.50 euros plus the price of the call. Born in 1933, the speaking clock, world premiere, is an invention of Ernest Esclagon, astronomer and director of the Paris Observatory. During its commissioning, on February 14 of that year, its success was such that out of the hundred and forty thousand calls made, only twenty thousand could obtain an answer. 2>
atomic clocks
In 1991, Orange, then called France Telecoms, had signed a partnership with the Paris Observatory. The year 1991 marks, in fact, the construction of a specific infrastructure to ensure the dissemination of legal time in France with hourly precision of the order of 10 milliseconds. Fourth generation of model, the current talking clock takes its source on the “coordinated universal time” of the Paris Observatory, generated from a set of atomic clocks of the Syrte laboratory.
The cessation of this historic service is the consequence of the “programmed end of life” of the materials essential to its operation and above all of “regular and significant decrease” of the number of calls to 3699. “The digitalization of equipment , the multiplication of sources that can give the time, mobiles, computers, tablets, inevitably participate in this erosion, “said Orange again in a press release.