Introduction

Abstract

If every decade has its name, than the nineties are certainly the decade of mobile communication. Never before the telecommunication market has changed so much. This has been made possible by major changes in two areas. First, there is the political aspect. For several decades, every country had its own PTT (Post, Telephone and Telegraph) institute, a government-owned company that enjoyed a monopoly to exploit the country’s fixed telephone system. Mobile telephony services were provided by these PTTs, and were regarded as an addition to the fixed network. The liberalization imposed by the European Union will put an end to this by the end of 1998. Most PTTs have already gone public, and in a lot of countries there is already at least one competitor operating a mobile network. Competition between the operators will certainly cause a drop in prices, leading to an increase in mobile users.