Brussels, 05/02/2001 (Agence Europe) - ECTA, the European Competitive Telecommunications Association, which advocates competition, recently published a scoreboard showing the relevant success of different EU Member States in opening up their local loops. ECTA Director Phil Evans notes that "despite the EU Regulation which came into force at the beginning of the year, and which required regulators to open up incumbent operators' networks, new entrants are still being kept out of most European markets". In his view, key markets such as France and the United Kingdom, remain virtually unbundled. He calls on national operators to act faster in favour of unbundling in so far as the private operators could not "sustain a process of roll-out that takes years rather than months". He fears "most EU markets will see little unbundling and incumbents will extend their de factor monopoly into fixed broadband DSL service". The ECTA survey mentions the case of Germany, which has been unbundling for the past two years but where new entrants have just 600,000 lines out of the incumbent's 47 million analogue lines, less than 2% of the total.