Telecoms deregulation - only fools rush in?

The European Commission (EC) has had enough of politely asking dominant phone operators to speed up the web.

Today it has proposed a regulation that will force the unbundling of the local loop by Christmas - six months earlier than the UK's Oftel and BT were anticipating. What happens next? There are at least two possible outcomes. BT goes into shock. It gets angry with Oftel, which gets angry with the Department for Trade and Industry, which makes its representation to the EU Council of Ministers. UK ministers gain support from other member states who are even further from full deregulation - such as Greece and Portugal. United they stand. Faced with such ardent disapproval from its ministers, the EC retreats, muttering that at least it gave the telcos a short, sharp shock. Alternatively, the anti-BT brigade seizes its moment and demands all those wondrous technologies waiting in the pipeline NOW. Like an angry child, it stamps its foot and shuts its eyes to all normal procedures of testing and double testing before implementation. Momentum picks up, silicon.com viewers get heated, and before we know it we are experiencing ADSL, but often across networks where the rollout has been rushed and integration poor. Problems with one carrier snowball into bigger problems with another - and it will take a good deal longer than six months to sort them out. It comes down to a simple point. Dare we trust BT to follow a simple schedule that has already been agreed with Oftel? Or should we rush in and risk chaos? Surely now is the time for conceding that BT is no longer the villain of the piece.