TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY IN THE EUROPEAN-UNION - DEVELOPING THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

By the end of this century, the telecommunications market in the European Union will have been transformed from a collection of national monopolies providing little apart from basic voice telephony and Value-Added Network Services (VANS) into a unified, competitive market for multimedia services - or at least that is the intention behind a series of directives issued by the European Commission. This should open up enormous opportunities for service providers, whatever their origin, and the process of forming the necessary alliances for world-wide coverage has begun in earnest. A first step, in many cases, is the privatization of the national monopoly provider. New forms of competition such as cable and mobile telephony are springing up with unprecedented speed - so fast, indeed, that the consumer is being left in the wake of the technology.