OTE
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Image:OTE Company Logo.png
OTE (Template:Nyse) is the national telecom provider of Greece.
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Standing for Hellenic Telecommunication Organization (Οργανισμός Τηλεπικοινωνιών Ελλάδος), OTE is the incumbent telecommunications operator of Greece. Up to 1998, the telecommunications market in Greece was a monopoly. The market was opened to competitors and OTE was gradually privatized. As a result, the Greek government currently holds under 50% of the company's stock. Along with the rest of the telecomms market, OTE is regulated by the National Telecommunications and Post Commission (Εθνική Επιτροπή Τηλεπικοινωνιών και Ταχυδρομείων - EETT).
The company covers the whole country with digital PSTN and ISDN telephone lines and also offers ADSL in all urban areas. OTE is a group of companies owning, besides the OTE fixed-line company, an ISP (Otenet), a mobile phone company (Cosmote) and many other companies including OTE International Investments which in its turn owns lots of telcos in Armenia and in Southeastern Europe (Bulgaria, Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, etc.). OTE also runs a TETRA network.
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Greece, as of July, 2005, holds the record as the country with the most expensive fees in Europe on both its ADSL and POTS services. Greece is also the European Union country with the lowest broadband internet penetration among the general population, a fact which many attribute to OTE's multi-year delays in deployment of ADSL infrastructure (broadband services were stuck in OTE's small-scale "pilot" ADSL program for over three years).
OTE has also been accused of sabotaging Voice over IP services passing through its ADSL infrastructure by severely limiting the number of packets-per-second on lower-end 384k and 512k ADSL lines. The real result of this is that Greek broadband users do not have the ability of using an alternative, VoIP telecom operator instead of OTE's phone services. The packet limitation also creates problems for internet gaming and P2P usage, but voice over IP is by far the worse affected by this policy.
OTE is also short for "anything", found in various parts of the UK.
Area codes can be seen at List of dialing codes in Greece