Brussels, 31/08/2006 (Agence Europe) - Italy, with a level of only 12.7% compared with a Community average of 14.1% (EU25), is falling behind Member States which have a better level of broadband penetration. In the 15 old Member States, only Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Spain have worse results than Italy. This is the finding of the European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA) in its European Broadband Scoreboard, the complete results of which will be available in September. According to ECTA, one of the main reasons is the inefficiency of Italian regulation which allows the incumbent operator Telecom Italia to hold 72% of the market - the largest of any one company within the EU15 - and thus discourages competition. Despite strong market demand and the introduction of innovative services by other operators such as Tiscali, Fastweb and Wind, further development of other services by competitors is being hampered by the insufficient degree of competition established so far, says ECTA, which is calling for the creation of a regulatory environment, without which there is the risk of a snowball effect. “…without effective regulation, abuse of market power on broadband access may easily extend to downstream IP services, using a strategy based on a refusal to interconnect or interoperate, thus further restricting competition,” warns ECTA, and it calls on Italian telecoms regulator AGCOM to focus on making local loop unbundling and wholesale broadband access more effective.