ABSTRACT
SUMMARY The European Community is principally involved with telecommunications in two ways: through support for cooperative research, notably on broadband technologies; and in the area of regulation and standards, along the lines of the 1987 Green Paper, Towards a dynamic European economy. The regulatory involvement with telecommunications is driven by two factors: the convergence of telecommunications with computing, which poses the need for competition to be extended to areas of telecommunications that have traditionally been under monopoly; and the requirements of the single market of 1992, within which telecommunications must be integrated to function as a basic informational infrastructure. In the technology area, broadband and other technologies will be critical to the future competitiveness of the European telecommunications industry, and require extensive pan-European cooperation in order to operate on the appropriate scale.
