Monti threatens telecom incumbents

dahamsta

http://www.enn.ie/news.html?code=7647762

Mario Monti, the European Union Competition Commissioner, said he is considering fines for incumbent telecoms in Europe for not giving full access to local loops.

This is not the first such threat made by the European Commission. In March the Commission said it was considering lawsuits against Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland and Portugal for failing to allow entrant telecoms to access the local loops of former monopolies such as Deutsche Telekom in Germany and Eircom in Ireland. Access to these local loops, the so-called last mile, is considered a necessity if smaller telecoms are to be able to offer affordable data services.

"We must bring de facto monopolies in the local loop to an end," Monti said on Tuesday at a conference in Brussels. "Competition law will be necessary in complementing the regulation in force," he added.

aidan_dunne

It's about time Monti and the EU came down on the likes of Eircom. However, I have two worries about the approach they might be taking.

1. Chances are Monti, Likkanen and the EU will go after DT first because they are bigger and going up against them would be a bigger publicity coup. Whilst they try to tackle DT, Eircom would still be able to run riot in our market. If they are going to go after the incumbents, they should give each and every one of them the same level of attention and tackle them all at once, if possible.

2. They seem to be totally stuck on the whole LLU issue but you know exactly what Eircom are going to say about this. They'll give them the usual Eircom line about how "the local loops have been unbundled since last year and it's not our fault if no other operator wants to take advantage of it. We've done our bit so you can't blame us for not unbundling the loop. We have. It's up to others to take advantage of this." And, as usual, Eircom will probably get away with this.

I think there are other issues apart from LLU that the EU need to look at as well such as market dominance, incumbants trying to hold onto their monopolies and using their monopolies to stifle competition, broadband pricing and, very importantly for us, introduction of flat-rate access across all EU states.

This, I feel, is both good news and bad news for us. Let's see what happens next.

dahamsta

I won't be holding my breath. Monti's all talk and no action.

adam

stormkeeper

I mean, with Intel, the US companies, Forfás, and that recent article, as well as the EUCC now getting in on the act, they'll have to do something asap. Maybe this will help Esat and all the other ISPs?

Edit: Erm, well... Even not including Monti, Eircom is recieving a bit of pressure now