Telecom CEOs urge less regulation to spur broadband

* Europe holds industry conference to debate broadband

* Regulators worry telcos not investing enough in networks

* Telecom groups want less regulation, new business models

PARIS, July 13 (Reuters) - The bosses Europe's big telecoms companies on Wednesday urged regulators to adopt a lighter touch on big industry mergers and allow telecom firms to charge major websites like Google to prioritise their traffic on networks.

These and other recommendations were put forward by a group of telecom industry executives at a conference in Brussels held by the European Commission to look at why investment in high speed broadband was lagging across much of the continent.

Nellie Kroes, the European Commissioner for the digital agenda, called the meeting because of growing concerns among governments that telecom operators were not building out fiber optic networks quickly enough, putting the region's long-term economic competitiveness at risk.

The European Union has set ambitious targets to bring basic broadband to all Europeans by 2013 and by 2020 half of all households should have access to super fast broadband above 100 megabits per second.

But those goals could remain out of reach because many telecom companies across the region have not begun building fiber networks, despite pledges to spend billions of euros on rollouts.

Major companies like France Telecom , Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE) have complained that they will end up having to share their networks with rivals, even after having shelled out to build them.

As a result, many are content to rely on older broadband networks with their assured cashflows a bit longer rather then spend heavily on new infrastructure.

After several months of talks, the executives, led by Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy, Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen, and Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE) boss Rene Olbermann, ended up delivering familiar policy prescriptions

They asked for uniform European-level rules to reduce regulatory uncertainty and for governments not to stand in the way of mergers and network-sharing initiatives that can help telecom operators achieve scale to better compete.

The industry also urged European regulators to grant them more leeway to sign corporate agreements on so-called "traffic management," by which operators favour some data flowing over their networks above others. Consumer advocates say this is unfair and will lead to a two-speed Internet.

France Telecom CEO Stephane Richard has been vocal in his support of finding ways to make websites pay, arguing that telecom companies shouldn't bear the cost of building networks alone while tech giants like Apple and Google skim off all the profit from running services over the Internet.

"Europe needs healthy companies willing and capable to invest," the executives wrote in a draft version of the proposals. "Players who add value should be stimulated by the right incentives."

The industry's recommendations did not mention another approach favoured by some consumer advocates and technology experts: building one fiber network per country or region and then allowing operators to rent space over it and compete more on the basis of consumer offerings than the networks.

Most big telecom operators oppose this because they fear being reduced to the role of a utility, stripped even of its main asset, the network.

A spokesman for Nellie Kroes declined to comment on the details of the proposals, saying only that the recommendations did not represent the overall tenor of the discussions between regulators and operators.

The Commission is expected to file a statement after the conclusion of the conference tonight. (Reporting by Leila Abboud and Francesco Guarascio in Brussels. Editing by Jane Merriman)