ART renders a favourable opinion on France Télécom's new IP-ADSL pricing offers (option 5)

Paris, 18 July 2002

On 30 April 2002, Autorité de Régulation des Télecommunications (ART) requested that France Telecom draft new proposals which would include the necessary coherence between the "option 5" offer intended for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and the "option 3" offer for operators. This would guarantee effective competition on the various segments of the ADSL market.
Following discussions between ART and France Telecom, new pricing proposals were submitted for IP/ADSL offers, as well as for the "option 3" offer.

ART examined the proposals, verifying that they comply with the principles defined in its opinion dated 30 April. In particular, it examined their effect on the conditions under which ISPs and operators can operate on the market on these new bases.

· Significant fee decreases: 25 to 40% for all players

- for option 5
ART adopted today a favourable opinion on the new pricing proposals submitted by France Télécom. The fee for option 5 (intended for ISPs) drops by 25% on average. Moreover, ISPs and their customers will benefit from an extended range of speeds up to 1024 Kbit/s.

- for option 3
For option 3, which is intended for operators, the fee decrease is 40% on average. Moreover, operators will be able to offer ISPS different ranges of bitrates, comparable to France Télécom's IP-ADSL offer, allowing them to compete with the incumbent operator's new IP-ADSL offer.

· Implementation on 15 October 2002
To avoid any time lags which would make these changes ineffective, the technical and financial conditions of "option 3" offers will have to be made available sufficiently early to allow competing operators to provide their clients with offers at the same time as France Télécom. Given the time required to prepare them, ART has requested that the technical and financial conditions of these offers be ready by 15 September 2002 at the latest, so that offers can be made to ISPs by 15 October 2002.

· Now complete and coherent

Thus, these new measures will significantly improve the situation of ISPs on the ADSL market, while ensuring that operators benefit from viable entry conditions for this market.
As part of the decisions and directions chosen by ART on 16 and 30 April, and to complement ART's action on unbundling, these new measures now make available a complete and coherent whole, which creates equitable and dynamic conditions for the development of high-speed access in France. This will ensure that effective competition is developed to the benefit of consumers.