Many PTTs have been partially or completely privatised in recent years, though a few, such as Posta ve Telgraf Teşkilatı of Turkey, Myanma Posts and Telecommunications of Myanmar and Tusass of Greenland, continue to remain wholly government-owned.
In countries that had a PTT unit of government, typically the vast majority of forms of distribution of information fell under the auspices of the PTT, whether that be the delivery of printed publications and individual letters in the postal mail, the transmission of telephonic audio, or the transmission of telegraphic on-off signals, and in some countries, the broadcast of one-way (audio) radio and (audio-video) television signals.
In North America, instead of a PTT there was the private monopoly Bell System (for the US)/Bell Canada (dominant ILEC in Ontario, Quebec and (historically) parts of what is now Nunavut; competes with other fixed-line carriers in the rest of Canada) responsible for telecommunications and a separate federally run US Postal Service/Canada Post for mail delivery.
Japan also had a rather similar structure as North America with the formerly-state-owned Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT; privatised in 1985) having a monopoly on fixed-line telecoms, with the separate government-run but publicly-traded Japan Post responsible for mail delivery; as did Spain with Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España (CTNE; privatised in 1997) having a monopoly on fixed-line telecoms, with the separate state-owned Correos de España responsible for mail delivery.
Portugal, until 1968, had a mixture, with a private telecom operator in Lisbon and Porto (named APT – Anglo-Portuguese Telephone Company) another private company in charge of connections with and between colonies and with the rest of the world (CPRM – Companhia Portuguesa de Rádio Marconi) and Correios, Telefones e Telégrafos, a public company, as the PTT agency and owner of the telephone system in the rest of the country (including the former colonies); that year, APT was nationalised and became Telefones de Lisboa e Porto (TLP).