Infrastructure competition and the European Union's telecommunications policy

Until today the European Union has followed a service-based approach towards liberalizing telecommunications markets. This policy will be accomplished by liberalizing voice telephony in 1998. While telecommunications infrastructure has so far not been regulated at the Community level, member states have developed different national approaches in this sector. Many are now in a process of privatization and of reviewing the network monopoly of their national telecommunications organizations. Rapid technological change, the experience of network competition in other countries and regulatory reform at the member state level make it necessary to develop a Community policy towards telecommunications infrastructure. This will be done in a Green Paper on infrastructure by the European Commission due in early 1995. After briefly reviewing the European Union's telecommunications policy to date, this article discusses the benefits which may arise from a policy of infrastructure liberalization at the Community level. It is argued that only by introducing competition between network operators can the benefits of the Community's service-based approach be fully reaped.