Joint commercial decisions must be taken by the TOs without delay to ensure rapid extension of European basic services beyond telephony. The European information society is emerging from many different angles. European infrastructure is evolving into an ever tighter web of networks, generic services, applications and equipment, the development, distribution and maintenance of which occupy a multitude of sources worldwide. In an efficient and expanding information infrastructure, such components should work together. Assembling the various pieces of this complex system to meet the challenge of interoperability would be impossible without clear conventions.
Standards are such conventions.
Open systems standards will play an essential role in building a European information infrastructure. Standards institutes have an honourable record in producing European standards, but the standardisation process as it stands today raises a number of concerns about fitness for purpose, lack of interoperability, and priority setting that is not sufficiently market driven. These requirements would then provide input to the competent standardisation body. This type of mechanism would adequately respond to market needs. Operators, public procurement and investors should adopt unified open standard-based solutions for the provision and the procurement of information services in order to achieve global interoperability.