Telegrams have retired: fewer and fewer mailings in the world, and major companies suspending service because business has been overtaken by email and instant messaging. But niches survive and new routes for telexes are emerging. One of these points goes straight to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, and more precisely to Lasnamäe, the Soviet-style district of the city overlooking the Baltic Sea. The telegraph delivery company Telegraf ÖU, founded by Aleksander Sahan, is based here. The entrepreneur is convinced that he still has a lot of work to do in the coming years.

Decisions such as that of Deutsche Post, which since the beginning of the year has stopped sending telegrams due to lack of demand, are new opportunities that are opening up. This was also the case five years ago when the Belgian Post Office took the same path: messages sent via Brussels took the Tallinn route. “Many Italians and Serbs, but also French and Canadians send them“, Sahan told ERR. The fundamental thing to know is the address to which to deliver the envelope with the printed message: there are those who choose this formula for the institutional tone it has, or because they know the street where the person you want to contact lives and you have no other contact details. The telegram then becomes a way to restore communication with a distant person.

Telegraf ÖU is building a network of stations connected by the telex system to communicate. Until a few years ago there were about thirty companies that used this service and today there are eighty. After all, Estonians know how to prioritize simplicity.

With the connection via telegraph, companies can connect directly and send all kinds of information. Two-way communication is considered safer than the web, therefore. Communication is chosen above all by small banks, and credit institutions that do not want to use the Swift system or that consider it too expensive.

“Most of our customers are located in very exotic countries like Vanuatu or Borneo“, said Sahan, “but Australia is also an important market for us“. The only off-limits country is Mongolia: you cannot send telegrams to Ulan Bator because there is no one who can deliver the messages. While it is possible to do so towards North Korea, even if in the opposite direction no communication has ever arrived.