“We count on competition and we believe that the consumer’s interests must be fulfilled first and foremost by the means of the free market mechanisms, and where these prove to be insufficient , we will intervene with regulations”, declared the Vice-president of the ANRC , Alexandra Hirtan, on Wedenesday, January 29, 2003, in the opening of the conference “Telecoms-now you can choose”, that took place at the Bucharest World Trade Center, gathering representatives of users and providers of electronic communication services (juridical persons), of the authorities, professional associations and of the operators on the communications market.
Alexandrina Hirtan presented also, in brief, the situation of the notifications received by the ANRC from the companies that intend to enter the electronic communications market, situation that illustrates the dynamism of this sector.
Thus, General Authorization and Licenses Section of the ANRC registered a number of 687 records. Amongst these, some were completions of records already filed, some were redirected to other institutions, because they were outside ANRC competence, and another almost 100 files are being processed.
502 companies notified the The National Regulatory Authority for Communications. 308 of them have been delivered the standard certificate, the remaining files being processed or in various stages of record completion
The majority of the notifications come from Bucharest (161), followed by those from the counties of Bacau (22), Arges (16) and Vrancea (15). If analyzed by region, 24% of the notifications came from Transylvania, 20% from Moldavia, and 56% from Walachia (those coming from Bucharest constituting the majority amongst them).
According to the received notifications, 478 companies intend to provide electronic communications networks, as follows:
| Private communications networks | 95 |
| Public communications networks | 383 |
As regards the companies that have manifested the intention to provide public fixed communications networks, the figures are the following:
| Publicly available telephony services providers | 107 |
| Leased lines services providers | 87 |
| Other services than telephony and leased lines providers | 214 |
The 107 companies wishing to provide publicly available telephony services will enter on the following markets:
| Local calls market | 71 |
| Long distance calls market | 84 |
| International calls market | 97 |
51 companies manifested the intention to install public phones and another 48 will provide ISDN services. 159 of the 214 providers of other services than telephony and leased lines are Internet Service Providers. They will make use of:
| dial-up | 135 |
| cable | 99 |
| leased lines | 137 |
| radio | 128 |
According to the information presented by the providers in the notifications, some companies choose to provide more types of services (e.g. telephony and data transmission or local, long distance and international calls concomitantly) or to make use of more than one connection type (e.g. dial-up and cable, or cable and leased, leased lines and radio simultaneously).
At the beginning of February, a public directory of electronic networks and services providers that will include comprehensive information about the companies that have realized the notification and about the networks and services these intend to provide will become available on the ANRC website.