The European Commission is to ask the new Spanish government how it plans to provide a level playing field in the Spanish mobile phones market: the Commission has made it clear it thinks the Airtel consortium led by US AirTouch Communications Inc, which was charged $670m for operating the country’s second cellular network, was unfairly treated. It will ask the government about its plans to compensate Airtel. It will also ask Telefonica de Espana SA, which runs Spain’s first cellular phone network, to detail its network costs to assess how much was financed by Telefonica itself and how much by the state. The former Spanish government and Telefonica argued that the Airtel fee was fair because Telefonica had huge costs in building the national telephone network under its obligation to provide universal service. But as in the cases of similar fees imposed on second mobile phone operators in Belgium, Italy, Austria and Ireland, the Commission would insist that an equal payment be made by the first operator or that the second be compensated, it said.
