BERLIN -- The clock is running out for Germany's telephone monopoly, and new players for Europe's richest phone business are leaping into the market from abroad and from German industrial giants better known for bashing metal than making connections.


This week two partnerships were announced: British Telecommunications plc and the German industrial group VIAG AG said they would start offering telecoms services in April; and the Daimler-Benz subsidiary Deutsche Aerospace joined with Canada's Northern Telecom.


They joined a string of other German companies trying to diversify into telecommunications from their core businesses.


No wonder. Germany's market is worth 70 billion Deutsche marks ($45 billion) a year and growing, and the voice telephone monopoly held by Deutsche Telekom ends Jan. 1, 1998.


Beyond that, the European Union has proposed approving the use of "alternative networks" by 1998, meaning that electricity utilities could add phone cables to their existing networks and join the fray.


This gives companies a chance to vie both for Deutsche Telecom's standard telephone services and for the hardware side of operating communications networks.


Deutsche Telekom itself is to be privatized starting in 1996 and plans to cut its staff of 230,000 to about 200,000 to become a leaner combatant in the field.


One competitor is the electricity supplier RWE, based in Essen in western Germany, which covers 40 percent of Germany's land area and 50 percent of the population. It has been working for three years to get its company-internal phone network ready for public service, upgrading with fiber-optic cable.


VIAG, which announced a deal Tuesday with British Telecom, is active in metals, chemicals, glass, transport and packaging. Its entry to telecoms is via the 58 percent interest it acquired in 1993 in the Bavarian electricity utility, Bayernwerk, which has 4,000 kilometers of fiber-optic network.


The deals remain risky, analysts and company officials caution. "BT and VIAG will require a full license for it to be of significant moment for BT outside its home market," said analyst Paul Norris of Barclays de Zoete Wedd, a London brokerage.


Maximilian Ardelt, a member of VIAG's management board, also told reporters in London there was risk involved.


"The exact nature of how competition to German Telekom will be regulated is still not known," he said.


To reduce the risk, both deals announced Tuesday had non-German telecoms companies teaming with powerful German firms likely to have the clout to win phone licenses eventually.


Canada's Northern Telecom is in a deal with Germany's biggest industrial group, Daimler-Benz, which until the early 1980s was known mostly for producing luxury Mercedes-Benz autos. In building a diversified conglomerate, Daimler-Benz created Deutsche Aerospace, which makes aircraft and space gear including satellites.


Its venture with Northern Telecom aims to offer such business services as networks and network management, local area networks and technologies for multimedia, as well as satellite communications.


Even heavy industrial companies are joining the German telecoms market. Thyssen, one of Germany's oldest names in steel, has teamed with the energy conglomerate Veba to build a digital cellular phone network.


Mannesmann, known mostly for heavy machinery and building factories, has been into mobile phones since 1989. It says it changed its business strategy to focus more on sectors with end consumers, and its expectations have been exceeded in telecommunications.