Croatia's telecommunications market is being progressively liberalised in line with the country's commitments to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreement signed in 2000 requiring member states to open their telecommunications sectors to competition. Croatia also harbours ambitions of joining the European Union (EU) by 2007; to be successful, the country's telecommunications market will need to be completely liberalised and all legislation should mirror that adopted in existing EU member states. Croatia's fixed network services market was opened to competition at the end of 2002, although incumbent fixed-line operator Hrvatske Telekomunikacije (HT) is not legally required to surrender access to its local loop network until the end of 2004. In the meantime, a large number of value-added network service providers and a handful of (mostly) localised Internet service providers (ISPs) have begun offering commercial services in competition with HT.

Nevertheless, the Croatian authorities have begun soliciting expressions of interest in applications for a second national fixed-line operator licence. At the time of writing, no formal announcement had been made concerning progress in this regard. Consequently, HT will likely face no real significant competition in the fixed-line market for some time, as the localised cable TV operators appear to be content merely to add Internet services to their basic TV programming packages and the national rail and power companies - Hrvatske Zeljeznice (HZ) and Hrvatske Elektroprivreda (HEP) - have yet to seriously move forward with plans to combine and commercialise their nationwide private communications networks. The mobile communications market is exposed to minimal competition, with just two operators serving approximately 2.3 million customers at the end of 2002.