The future of Europe's largest fibre-optic data network is now in its customers hands as the hours tick away before a Monday night deadline to keep KPNQwest alive.

The administrators of the bankrupt Amsterdam-based company have promised to shut down its network if its customers do not pay their bills.

But while last week was all doom and gloom, enough may have signed up to keep the network afloat - as long as everyone who has said they will stump up the cash lives up to their word.

"After marathon talks over the last few days, it looks like all the pieces are in place," a source close to KPNQwest's administrators told Reuters.

Ownership blues

One of the key players is KPN, the Dutch incumbent telco which - with embattled US carrier Qwest - is a co-founder and main stockholder.

KPN owes 23m euros, by some distance the largest outstanding bill.

Its attitude to its wayward child has been ambivalent, at one point having cut off KPNQwest staff's mobile phones before reconnecting them.

Its decision could make or break the administrators' plan to keep the 18-country pan-European network running with a skeleton staff.

Generally speaking, though, customers are considered likely to want to keep the company alive for the moment, if only to give them more breathing space for an orderly transfer of their traffic elsewhere.

Dark fibre

If KPNQwest does go dark, other carriers - such as the UK's Colt Telecom - are keen to pick up the pieces, helping calm recent fears that a KPNQwest collapse could hobble internet traffic in general.

Irish carrier eTel, for instance, said on Monday that it is looking into whether it can buy KPNQwest's east European networks.

The operations, in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, are profitable, unlike both the rest of KPNQwest and the vasta majority of telcos in the region.

After all, it is not as if Europe is short on capacity.

That, indeed, has been KPNQwest's problem, along with most of its competitors.

According to Washington DC-based consultancy TeleGeography, only 4% of the long-distance fibre capacity in Europe is actually being used.

More of the same

As a result, KPNQwest's decision last month to seek protection from its creditors was only the latest in a string of collapses worldwide.

From Global Crossing to Flag Telecom, companies once valued in the billions have fallen victim to the huge debts they incurred in the 1990s building expansive networks under the impression that demand was essentially limitless.

Now, the KPNQwest story is likely to finish in a manner familiar to telecoms investors.

As with, for example, UK-based cable firm NTL, the only people likely to make back any money are the banks and lenders, leaving bondholders and equity investors out in the cold.