Defecting customers and falling profits have placed the future of Deutsche Telekom chief executive Kai-Uwe Ricke in doubt ahead of a supervisory board meeting this weekend.
The company hopes that lower prices and new telephone-internet bundles will halt the haemorrhaging that has cost the company over one million fixed-line customers so far this year.
But industry observers say the products on offer are too little, too late and too expensive. Cheaper products are available from rivals even though they have to rent Telekom's own lines.
Telekom hopes its big winner will be a new quad-service, on offer from next month, offering mobile and fixed-line telephony, broadband internet as well as IPTV broadband television and video-on-demand for €80 a month.
However, that competitive advantage could be eroded by the European Commission ruling earlier this week forcing the former German monopoly to open up to competitors the highspeed DSL and VDSL networks it will use for the service.
A day later, Germany's telecommunications regulatory authority announced it was imposing a new price structure on mobile phone operators to reduce the cost of calls between networks, said to account for a quarter of the revenue of Telekom's T-Mobile Germany division.
Another ruling means that Telekom customers will soon be able to order a DSL connection without renting a landline, another of Telekom's money-spinners.
Finally, British mobile giant Vodafone has just launched a new service offering customers mobile, fixed-line and internet in one, going into head-on competition with Telekom.
Mr Ricke said Telekom had proven its critics wrong in the past by not going along with every trend, like the rush by former monopolies such as British Telecom to divest themselves of their mobile divisions.
"British Telecom got back into the mobile market again in 2004 and now has to be happy with a tiny share of the market," he said. "Naturally, it's easy to follow short-terms trends - you don't get harsh criticism for that. But the comfortable way isn't always the right way."
Mr Ricke, 44, was a popular choice for chief executive in 2002 after a very public battle to get rid of predecessor Ron Sommer.
The new chief executive presided over the biggest single loss in European corporate history in 2003 but worked quickly to cut costs and announced 32,000 job cuts last year.
But he has struggled to stop rivalry and in-fighting between the company's various division heads.
"Whoever hasn't realised that we all have to pull in the same direction has no place in this company," he warned recently.
His contract runs out in the autumn of 2007 but there is already speculation that US investment company Blackstone, which owns 4 per cent of Telekom, is already calling for him to be fired.
Earlier this month, the company posted a 14 per cent drop in second quarter net profit, but the company said that hasn't affected its plans to pay a €0.72 dividend to shareholders in 2006.
