Open telecom market rings in new year

Jan 11, 2001
Aleksei Gunter

Local calls are now provided by two companies, although private
telephone users still have only one local calls provider - Eesti
Telefon.

Uninet Ltd. will provide local calls for business subscribers who use
their own telephone stations. Along with a variety of telephone
calls, the package will include full ISDN service. Local calls made
through the Uninet network would cost one Estonian cent less (0.17
and 0.23 Estonian kroons in off-peak and peak time respectively) than
Eesti Telefon's tariff.

It took up to two months to set the necessary equipment, according to
Uninet. The ordering price of the service is 8,000 kroons, and the
monthly fee is twice as cheap.

As usually happens in Estonia, telephone networks including the
mobile ones were overloaded on New Year's Eve.

Tele2 opened its network sharply at midnight on Dec. 31. More than
7,000 calls were made on Jan. 1 alone and most of them were to local
and mobile networks, according to Ivar Lukk, the administrative
director of Tele2. The average call length was about five minutes.

As of Jan. 2 Tele2 had about 30,000 registered business and private
clients, but only one third of them had returned the signed contract,
which is necessary to begin using Tele2's service.

Uninet declined to reveal the number of calls made through their
network so far.

Tele2 submitted a successful complaint on Eesti Telefon's
interconnection conditions to the Communications Board, and the
ex-monopoly admitted recently it was not prepared to accept the
Board's remedies.

Filed at the end of last year, Tele2's complaint regarded different
charges for Internet connection and regular phone calls and an
unreasonably high interconnection price overall.

The Communication Board upheld Tele2's protest and ordered Eesti
Telefon to change their interconnection conditions. Nevertheless,
Tele2 signed the interconnection agreement with Eesti Telefon on Dec.
29 in order to fulfill their promise to become a new telephone
service provider at the start of the new year, according to Lukk.

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