Brussels, 26/07/2006 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday, the European Commission authorised the proposed concentration between the French company Alcatel and the American company Lucent Technologies. It believes the merger will not significantly hamper effective competition in the European Economic Area (EEA) or in any substantial part of that area. Alcatel and Lucent provide telecom equipment and related services to communication network operators throughout the world and especially to service providers, governments and enterprise, and these communication networks allow telecom operators and businesses to transmit a wide range of content (voice, data or multimedia) to their clients worldwide, a press release states. The main effect of the operation on competition will concern the provision of optical network equipment (in particular optical circuit switches - OCS) and broad band access solutions (especially DSLAM - Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexor), the press release states, pointing out that the results of the Commission inquiry show that the market structure would remain competitive despite the substantial market share held by the entity formed from the proposed merger deal in these production areas. In particular, a number of effective competitors would remain on the market and some clients (network operators for the most part) would be able to influence the behaviour of the entity formed by the merger operation thanks to their compensatory power - which is proper to this industry -at the level of calls for tenders. The Commission inquiry also revealed that it was unlikely the merger proposal would pose any competition problems for the other activities carried out by the parties, such as routers/switches and narrowband/TDM switches. (For further information: http: //ec.europa.eu/comm/competition/mergers/cases/index/m84.htm#m_4214).