Experience abroad has shown that customers have received incorrect bills and that operators have lacked flexibility in offering tariff structures that differ fundamentally from those for cable services. One of the most requested abilities in the telephony business is a perfect understanding of tariff setting. Some projects seem to have failed because of lack of know-how in this field. A telephony system has to be even more reliable than a cable system. If the telephony subscriber to the cable network gets the impression that he has selected a less reliable service than he had before, he is lost to the cable operator.
More competitors Let's turn back to the marketplace.
The competition in the telephony market is, of course, not limited to the incumbent telco. Since we have been liberalised, quite a number of new players have already entered the market or are about to do so. We have new network operators like diAX, Sunrise and Worldcom, as well as telephone service providers like Justice and Global One . All these market entries have already had the effect of remarkably lowering prices for telephony, starting with long-distance connections, and it will soon also be the case for middle and short distances. Cable telephony today is not yet ready, and I wonder what the market will look like when they finally are.