OXFORD, United Kingdom-The guys at the European Commission must be delighted. They battled for more than a decade to liberalize the telecommunications sector and create a single European market.
Benefits from a common European identity remain elusive. That might be about to change. Ironically, it is an opportunistic telecom operator from Canada that could bring joy to Brussels.
“One possibility is that we consider Western Europe as a single country on our network,” said Yves Marois, chairman of Dolphin Telecom, “so we wouldn’t make any roaming or long-distance charges.”
Dolphin Telecom is a specialized mobile radio (SMR) operator-known as public access mobile radio (PAMR) in Europe-and it does not have a pan-European network yet. But it is building one based on the TETRA digital standard. And it has prepared the ground well.
During the past few years, Telesystem International Wireless (TIW), Dolphin’s Canadian owner, steadily has acquired the major regional operators of analog SMR services in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal and Spain. TIW effectively has consolidated the industry and is now the largest SMR operator in Europe with nearly 300,000 subscribers.
It also has obtained all the digital spectrum available and holds TETRA licenses in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany and Portugal, covering a population of some 230 million and 60 percent of the European Union. Dolphin currently is competing with Telef
