There's a difference in how the markets were structured. In the old days in Europe telecommunications were generally seen as a public utility. The history of it goes back to the dawn of telephone services.
The history here (and it's part of UK history too as we were part of the UK until 1922) was that the early networks were private and were subsequently nationalised and rolled into the GPO's telegraph operations. It made some sense as the early companies were somewhat chaotic and there were issues around reliability and lack of interconnection and also the GPO had long routes for telegraph cables already in place and an international network. When the telephone services began to be seen as essential national infrastructure, there was a move to put them on the same basis as the telegraph system.
They remained like that until the 1980s.
The present day approach in Europe is regulated competition with heavy focus on preventing monopolies developing. The approach here for example deems a number of larger players to be 'incumbents', which is defined by their market share basically or by their having a monopoly over some aspect of access infrastructure. Once they're deemed to be an 'incumbent' they have to open (at regulated commercial rates) their access infrastructure networks which (here at least) includes wholesale access to networks on a virtual / logical basis and also unbundling of physical infrastructure (physical wiring networks, ducts, poles, central offices etc)
If you take this market, which is quite small (5 million people so the size of a mid sized US state) there are 4 large fixed line access companies (fibre / copper / cable), at least 10 companies providing significant long distance fibre networks within Ireland, umpteen different international fibre networks, various companies doing wholesale voice services (about 25+), at least 25 ISPs, various small local wireless ISPs (wISPs) providing voice and data in rural areas, 3 infrastructural mobile networks and about 10 MVNOs, a couple of cable operators, and you've all sorts of white label providers and companies assembling services by buying white label services - so you could end up buying your broadband and mobile from a supermarket chain under their own brand, multiple cable and cable-like IPTV providers.
We've a history of small local cable operators (going back to the 1960s) which evolved into small local ISP/telcos that were quite present in the 1990s. You'd various small towns with their own mom & pop scale cable companies offering broadband. Almost all of those were 'hoovered up' by Liberty Global in recent years and combined into Virgin Media.
Also, cable operators played a huge role in the cities and wiped the floor with the old Telecom operator back in the 1990s, so in cities like Dublin the dominant operator is actually Virgin Media / Liberty Global (cable operator) not the old PSTN players. If anything they're now trying very hard to 'win back' long lost customers to using FTTH offerings.
Internet infrastructure here also hasn't revolved around the old telco monopolies. The key interconnection infrastructure is mostly operated by industry owned associations. So for example, the INEX (Irish Neutral Exchange) and a couple of smaller regional ones like CIX (Cork Internet Exchange)operates multiple nodes where the vast majority of our national internet traffic is interconnected through data centres with high capacity peering with all the ISPs, major content providers, long distance fibre operators etc etc. That infrastructure is owned largely by its members i.e. all the ISPs and telcos who use it to interconnect.
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The other big historical difference was there was no European AT&T/Bell System equivalent - a few of the bigger old national telcos tried to be that but didn't have the scale to vertically integrate. The result of that was you'd a very healthy raft of independent telecommunication equipment makers in Europe that evolved over the decades and were pretty innovative. It's where the likes of Ericsson, Nokia, and also many of the ITT affiliates grew up. As well as a raft of companies (or former subsidiaries) that are now merged into bigger players like Siemens Networks, Alcatel, Marconi and others.
The GSM open standards for example grew out of that kind of need for interpretability across multiple players, multiple countries and telcos that didn't want to be bound to a single supplier and were part of that philosophy of regulated, standardised but highly competitive environments.
It's a different commercial history but the market in Europe is not dominated by PTTs and hasn't been in decades. There was competition, its just in different areas and also EU countries are (with a few exceptions) more on the scale of mid sized U.S. states. So their historical PTTs were comparable to at most one is the “baby Bells.” Even the largest of them weren’t anything like the scale of Ma Bell.
You’ve also got a lot of layers of regulation. There’s a broader EU regulation framework around anti-trust, interoperability, technical standards and the broader European telecommunications market and then you’ve 27 national regulators doing their own thing with in that framework.
Where Europe still falls down is the EU wide market is still highly fragmented. Some good moves in recent years like mandating pan-EU voice and data roaming (you can use your plan anywhere in the EU (and a few other countries) and a lot of wholesale stuff is pan-EU but most services are very much sold and regulated locally within one EU member state. [this post was last edited: 5/23/2022-10:46]
The history here (and it's part of UK history too as we were part of the UK until 1922) was that the early networks were private and were subsequently nationalised and rolled into the GPO's telegraph operations. It made some sense as the early companies were somewhat chaotic and there were issues around reliability and lack of interconnection and also the GPO had long routes for telegraph cables already in place and an international network. When the telephone services began to be seen as essential national infrastructure, there was a move to put them on the same basis as the telegraph system.
They remained like that until the 1980s.
The present day approach in Europe is regulated competition with heavy focus on preventing monopolies developing. The approach here for example deems a number of larger players to be 'incumbents', which is defined by their market share basically or by their having a monopoly over some aspect of access infrastructure. Once they're deemed to be an 'incumbent' they have to open (at regulated commercial rates) their access infrastructure networks which (here at least) includes wholesale access to networks on a virtual / logical basis and also unbundling of physical infrastructure (physical wiring networks, ducts, poles, central offices etc)
If you take this market, which is quite small (5 million people so the size of a mid sized US state) there are 4 large fixed line access companies (fibre / copper / cable), at least 10 companies providing significant long distance fibre networks within Ireland, umpteen different international fibre networks, various companies doing wholesale voice services (about 25+), at least 25 ISPs, various small local wireless ISPs (wISPs) providing voice and data in rural areas, 3 infrastructural mobile networks and about 10 MVNOs, a couple of cable operators, and you've all sorts of white label providers and companies assembling services by buying white label services - so you could end up buying your broadband and mobile from a supermarket chain under their own brand, multiple cable and cable-like IPTV providers.
We've a history of small local cable operators (going back to the 1960s) which evolved into small local ISP/telcos that were quite present in the 1990s. You'd various small towns with their own mom & pop scale cable companies offering broadband. Almost all of those were 'hoovered up' by Liberty Global in recent years and combined into Virgin Media.
Also, cable operators played a huge role in the cities and wiped the floor with the old Telecom operator back in the 1990s, so in cities like Dublin the dominant operator is actually Virgin Media / Liberty Global (cable operator) not the old PSTN players. If anything they're now trying very hard to 'win back' long lost customers to using FTTH offerings.
Internet infrastructure here also hasn't revolved around the old telco monopolies. The key interconnection infrastructure is mostly operated by industry owned associations. So for example, the INEX (Irish Neutral Exchange) and a couple of smaller regional ones like CIX (Cork Internet Exchange)operates multiple nodes where the vast majority of our national internet traffic is interconnected through data centres with high capacity peering with all the ISPs, major content providers, long distance fibre operators etc etc. That infrastructure is owned largely by its members i.e. all the ISPs and telcos who use it to interconnect.
...
The other big historical difference was there was no European AT&T/Bell System equivalent - a few of the bigger old national telcos tried to be that but didn't have the scale to vertically integrate. The result of that was you'd a very healthy raft of independent telecommunication equipment makers in Europe that evolved over the decades and were pretty innovative. It's where the likes of Ericsson, Nokia, and also many of the ITT affiliates grew up. As well as a raft of companies (or former subsidiaries) that are now merged into bigger players like Siemens Networks, Alcatel, Marconi and others.
The GSM open standards for example grew out of that kind of need for interpretability across multiple players, multiple countries and telcos that didn't want to be bound to a single supplier and were part of that philosophy of regulated, standardised but highly competitive environments.
It's a different commercial history but the market in Europe is not dominated by PTTs and hasn't been in decades. There was competition, its just in different areas and also EU countries are (with a few exceptions) more on the scale of mid sized U.S. states. So their historical PTTs were comparable to at most one is the “baby Bells.” Even the largest of them weren’t anything like the scale of Ma Bell.
You’ve also got a lot of layers of regulation. There’s a broader EU regulation framework around anti-trust, interoperability, technical standards and the broader European telecommunications market and then you’ve 27 national regulators doing their own thing with in that framework.
Where Europe still falls down is the EU wide market is still highly fragmented. Some good moves in recent years like mandating pan-EU voice and data roaming (you can use your plan anywhere in the EU (and a few other countries) and a lot of wholesale stuff is pan-EU but most services are very much sold and regulated locally within one EU member state. [this post was last edited: 5/23/2022-10:46]
