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Bas
Burger, president of the British company's Americas unit, told
the newspaper that a lack of regulation has hampered competition
in the United States, where AT&T Inc <T.N> and Verizon
Communications Inc <VZ.N> control about 80 percent of the
telephone and broadband lines used by homes and businesses.
Burger said BT Group must charge customers more because it has
to pay large fees to the U.S. rivals to carry data over these
wires.
Contracts BT and others have with the U.S. telecoms should be
regulated to guarantee a minimum quality of service, he said.
For example, the U.S. companies have no specific time frame for
fixing an outage that takes down one of BT's networks, the
report said.
Verizon, AT&T and BT were not immediately available for comment.
British telecom regulator Ofcom is considering a breakup of BT,
the country's dominant provider, after its rivals accused it of
abusing its market position and failing to invest in the
broadband networks that the rivals rely on.
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in New York and Rama Venkat Raman
in Bengaluru; Editing by Andrew Roche and Lisa Von Ahn)
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