Hi Marko,

I'm glad to see the echo of our struggle against Telecom Italia has gone beyond Italian frontiers and it has been heard in Slovenia too. I'll try to describe to you italian situation.

Telecom Italia has been the only monopolist in wired telephony market till June '98 when other phone companies, Infostrada, Albacom, Colt and Tiscali, have been allowed by government and compent authorities to offer phone services on the long distance calls. Local phones are still a Telecom Italia monopoly, and this situation isn't going to change for a long period. The problem consists in the fact that Telecom is the owner of the all telephone network and also of the local loop (last-mile wired connection), which allows the end users to be connected to the central.

Concurrent companies have built long-distance backbones to carry voice and data signals but they don't have the capillar diffusion to the end users. So they have to pay interchange fees to Telecom Italia to give users phone services and it's obvious their offers consist in long distance and international calls (the most expensive ones that allow them to use their own backbones and cover the fees requested by the monopolist for interconnection).

Actually we pay about 1,6 US$/hour at morning and 0.85 US$/hour after 18.30. There's 50 % of discount for Internet connections. This scenario seems to get worse and worse because Telecom is going to raise the costs of local phones and reduce the costs of long distance one to face the lower prices proposed by the concurrency. A 22% of increase in local call costs is waited for the end of this year. We consider this situation simple unacceptable. Who suffer more are the Internet cybernauts because to log onto the net is possible thanks to local calls and the length of Internet connections is becoming longer and longer because the network in Italy is dramatically slow.

Imagine that statistics state that Italy is one of European countries with less Internet users and all that can't improve if the costs of connection will suffer of further augmentation. Here is the contest in which our battle takes place. Our goal is the birth of "numeri blu" (blue numbers), special phone number for Internet connections without any time-dependant costs for the users. Who wants to access the network through these numbers (each ISP will have its own blue number) has to ask for this service to Telecom and pay a monthly fee of 12.5 US$.

I've tried to explain how the Italian situation is, I hope to be in contact with you again. I can explain to you better the structure of our organization and the next steps of our struggle.

Best regards,

Federico