THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE LIBERALIZATION OF FIXED TELECOMMUNICATION MARKET, OPERATOR COMPETITIVENESS, AND THE QUALITY OF SERVICE

This paper analyzes whether the liberalization of fixed telecommunication market in Croatia encouraged real competition on the subject market, the state of competitiveness and how it affects consumers, i.e. end users. Although the liberalization is ongoing process in the market, the former monopolist Croatian Telecom (HT) still has dominant position and remains SMP (Significant Market Power) operator in all relevant telecommunication markets related to land line services. Taking into consideration exceptionally slow influence on share market made by alternative operators, the main question that arose is whether the financial situation of new operators will allow them to make investments in telecom infrastructure and equipment in order to take over significant share market by offering innovative products/services. The other important issue is to determine the impact of liberalisation process on end users of landline services. Although end users are relevant to the assessment of service quality, in this study their views on the quality of services were not examined, but the attitudes of employees of telecommunication operators. The reason for this is the fact that HT remains the leading operator due to the number of users, and the authors estimate that the disproportion of users of all investigated operators could be significantly different, thus the research results would not be reliable.