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European Telecoms Face New Competition

Long dominant in their respective markets, it now seems that the national telecommunications monopolies in European countries are faced with independent competition by companies seeking to push out the Telecoms and beat them at their own games. The majority of known efforts center around digital subscriber line, or DSL, customers. What is happening, basically, is that even in countries like Germany, where Deutsche Telekom owns 90 percent of the DSL connections, Net Cologne has been able to take away some business and offer DSL lines at a cheaper price.

To be more accurate, most of the competition from smaller companies is with former phone monopolies in states that used to have heavily subsidized phone service or other social offerings. The highly socialized nature of European governments - in the form of social programs combined with free market principles - led to individual state-run conglomerates dominating the communications scene. Any trip to France or elsewhere will demonstrate the power and influence of the "national brand".

In the United Kingdom, the formerly dominant British Telecom corporation has had to deal with the rise of such companies as Toucan, Telly2, and others. What`s worse for these monopolies of old is that more and more customers are choosing to make phone calls directly over the internet with programs such as Skype or even Yahoo Messenger. Devolution, it seems, far from being just a principle of some European politics, but communications as well.