ABSTRACT
France Telecom keep both the domestic and international monopoly over basic network and voice services, but the law does allow competition in the supply of terminal equipment and value-added services. The French telecommunications system was of extremely low quality until the 1960s. At that time, most provinces had manual telephone exchanges. By 1980 the French network had been upgraded to modern standards, and most users have received the telephone set that they had been expecting for quite a long time. The chapter provides an experimental method of deregulation in four fields: mobile communications, radio paging, resale of telematic services and cable networks. The cable networks, which had not been fully developed in France. This field had been part of the public monopoly according to a 1982 national plan on cable distribution, which stated ambitious objectives to develop fiber optics.
