Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications
 
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The regulatory triangle (3 May 2000)

A background issue over the past few months has been the timing of local loop unbundling - this being when other telecommunications operators will be allowed to install equipment in BT exchanges, rent the local loop from exchange to home, and start offering services fully competitive to BT.

  • BT has said unbundling cannot be done before June 2001 at the earliest.

  • OFTEL has said it might be brought forward a few months.

  • But the EU stated a few days ago that unbundling must take place, in all fifteen member states, by the end of December 2000!
This statement is not yet an EU directive - which, by law, must be implemented by individual governments - but there are strong hints that it will be turned into a directive by June.

The December 2000 deadline has been floating around for some time - at least since an EU summit in Portugal in March - and OFTEL issued a commentary on unbundling a few weeks ago which certainly poses some telling questions. Question 13 is particularly pertinent: local loop unbundling in the United Kingdom is definitely full local loop unbundling, with equipment from other telecommunications operators being located in BT exchanges and BT being obliged to provide access through a change to its operating licence. We wonder whether 'unbundling' in some other EU countries is merely unbundling in name; certainly there are continuing delays in France, although Germany had full unbundling built in to the first partial privatisation of Deutsche Telekom in 1998.

We feel that the inevitable compromise will take place, with member states which cannot make the December 2000 deadline being invited to ask the EU for exceptions to be made. However, what is being said now justifies what we - and many others - said at the time of OFTEL's consultation into local loop unbundling: the whole OFTEL unbundling timetable, proposed then and adopted virtually unchanged, was and is far too slack.

Although BT appears to be trying to tackle criticism of delays to ADSL in the best way - simply by doing things - bringing local loop unbundling forward would spur it on yet more and provide a broader variety of services to everyone more quickly.

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