Summary
WIK has carried out a comparative study for the Ministry of Economics and Technology on liberalization in the telecommunication sector in four countries - France, United Kingdom, US and Japan. Different approaches to regulation in each of the countries have been explained and differences in the development of the markets and competition resulting from the respective regulatory approach have accordingly been shown. The study focuses on liberalization of voice telephony and public telecommunications networks as well as the development of the mobile sector.
For each of the four countries the approach to regulation is characterized by mainly taking into account the following factors:
Opening of the market (stepwise or all at once) | |
Licencing conditions | |
Carrier selection and number portability rules that allow customers to change the telecommunications operator more easiliy | |
Interconnection and network-access rules that allow entrants to use bottleneck-resources | |
Universal service rules that require entrants to make financial contributions | |
Price regulation that restricts the scope for setting prices by the incumbent |
Different regulatory approaches have lead to considerably diverging market results particularly for fixed networks that are documented by looking at the following critiera:
Market entry and market share of entrants compared to the incumbent telephone operator | |
Development of prices after the opening of the market and build up of infrastructure by new comeptitiors | |
Penetration rates for fixed and mobile telephones and subscriber numbers |
(Only German language version available)
