A deadline set by the Spanish Government for the opening of local telephony markets looks set to pass without any signs of action. In June of this year Anna Birules, the Minister of Science and Technology, announced 15 November as the day when Telefonica's local exchanges were supposed to be open to alternative carriers to offer indirect local access. However no major operator is launching service. Grapes is said to be the only operator that has launched metropolitan services (according to ExpansionDirecto, the online version of newspaper Expansion). Retevision, Uni2, Alo and BT are not doing so. The reasons are many-fold. Telefonica has yet to inform competitors which exchanges they can access in order to offer 'metropolitan' access, whereby carriers need only access one Telefonica switch in a city in order to reach customers in the area. Once alternative carriers have been so informed it will take them, on one estimate, around 3 months to get interconnection up and running. Furthermore, the interconnection rates specified by the Spanish government have been denounced by Telefonica's rivals as untenable. "They do not allow us to offer competitive prices to residential customers", said Yolanda Erburu, Director of Communications at Uni2, pointing out that local telephony is the service most frequently used by residential customers.
