Deutsche Bundespost Telekom is urging the German government to clarify the further steps towards liberalisation of telephone markets by the end of the year, Reuter reports from Bonn. Bundespost Telekom supervisory board chairman Rolf-Dieter Leister told Sddeutsche Zeitung that lack of clarity over the ending of telephone monopolies could impede the phone company’s flotation in 1996. We must know by the end of 1994 what liberalisation will look like, which deadlines there will be and by what rules it will be carried out, Leister told the paper. The government responded yesterday by saying that it could indeed break Bundespost Telekom’s monopoly ahead of European Union plans to open liberalise telecommunications markets – the 1998 date covers only liberalisation of services, not infrastructure. Postal Minister Wolfgang Btsch said Germany would use its European Community presidency to seek consensus among postal and industry ministers to set a date to end existing monopolies in owning and operating telephone networks and if the Council of Ministers cannot decide by the end of the year on when to allow private industry to set up telephone networks in competition to state monopolies, Germany will abandon its official policy of moving in step with the foot-draggers among its European partners – the UK has had a partially liberalised environment since the early 1980s when Mercury Communications Ltd was licensed to build and operate its own facilities, and moved to something very close to complete liberalisation in 1990. We will have to consider whether we will create a law on our own to lift Telekom’s network monopoly, Btsch told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Btsch said European post and industry ministers, due to meet on September 28, could decide on November 17 to open telephone networks as well as services in 1998 rather that 2000, the year that was hitherto envisaged.For companies such as Mannesmann AG, which operates the biggest private mobile phone network, or power groups RWE AG and Viag AG, billions of investment dollars and potentially thousands of jobs are waiting in the pipeline, and the electricity companies have applied for a government licence to transmit data over their own communications networks before 1998 rather than lease lines from Telekom – in the UK, Energis Ltd, which is doing exactly that, has begun offering service ahead of imminent launch.
