1 January: fireworks, champagne and many newcomers on the telecom market

Many companies were in for a rough morning last week. The staff came to work, only to notice that all Internet communications had been cut. Consequently, operations came to a halt and the companies incurred losses. Their Internet provider – one of the leading companies on the market – explained it had been sabotaged: the fibre optics cable, installed on high-voltage poles, had been artfully sectioned.
The company also announced the reward for any information that could help apprehend the saboteur: one billion ROL.
This forebodes the rough war to be waged by the large telecom groups, once the New Year’s fireworks are over and the RomTelecom monopoly on the fixed telephony market comes to an end. If we go back about ten years, we can find similarities between last week’s event and the misfortunes that plagued the beginning of the cable TV market: back then, the TV cables belonging to dynamic companies were covered in lard by the competition, for the rats to chew on them, so that the respective company could be eliminated from a profitable area.
In the past few months, everybody has been hearing phrases such as “deregulation of the fixed telephony market,” “interconnection and collocation tariffs” over and over again. This inflation of expressions could bury the true significance of the event scheduled to take place on January 1, 2003. Under the circumstances, Ziarul Financiar has set out to review some of the conclusions of the disputes and press conferences of the past few months.
First of all, the consumers that will immediately have an alternative to RomTelecom mostly belong to the business sector. “For the voice services, one natural person will bring us 3-5 times smaller revenues than a customer from the business category, considering the same investment,” says Aurel Costea, Astral Telecom general manager.
Second, the companies will immediately launch offers for international telephony, in which case tariffs will even go down 50% for the business consumers. Moreover, as Mihai BatrA„sneanu, general manager of PCNET, has recently said, there will be offers for international voice services tailored to the size and needs of various companies. Furthermore, companies will also be able to negotiate everything communications with only one operator: voice, data transmission, Internet and video. Naturally, when several services are acquired from a sole supplier, total tariffs are lower.
Advertising will also benefit from the change. More than 80 companies had notified the National Agency for Communication Regulations (ANRC) on their intention to supply electronic communication networks and services as of January 1, 2003, with “a significant number of companies saying they are going to provide telephony services to the public,” according to the ANRC chairman Ion Smeeianu. All these companies will have to make their offers known to the public, hence an avalanche of spots is estimated for the first half of 2003.