Active Providers on the Telecommunications Liberalized Market

Today, August 11 2004, the President of the National Regulatory Authority for Communications, Ion Smeeianu, together with the management team of ANRC organised a press conference, presenting the ANRC half-yearly report for 2004.

The dynamic dialogue initiated between the ANRC management team and the press representatives highlighted the most important issues regarding the regulatory activity over the first 6 months of 2004, and summarized the statistical data reported by the providers of electronic communications regarding the market development after liberalisation, the rising trend of the main indicators, the interest in this market and its dynamics.

In 2003, the first year since liberalisation, 1039 providers of publicly available electronic communications networks and services were registered following their first report on statistical data and declared to begin activity in 2003. Out of these, 20 providers gradually gave up the right to provide electronic communications networks and services, while 149 providers declared that they did not provide electronic communications networks and services in 2003. ANRC registered 870 active providers on the electronic communications market in 2003.

Among the providers of telephony services, 13 providers actually provided local call services, 11 providers had a functional offer on the market of long distance calls and 24 providers offered international call services.

“The development of competition on the fixed telephony market, after liberalisation, is within normal parameters and may be compared to the one in the neighbouring states that feature a general authorisation regime similar to the one in Romania. Thus, there were 3 local call providers and 23 national call providers in Lithuania last year, while in Latvia 10 providers offered local calls and 29 offered national calls” , Ion Smeeianu, President of ANRC declared.

Regarding the provision of Internet access services, 145 of the providers registered in 2003 offered dial-up access, 56 – coaxial access, 52 – fibre optic access, 121 – radio access, 65 – xDSL access, and 124 providers offered access by other means. 45 providers offered data transmission services and 504 providers offered services of re-transmission of audio-video programmes (CATV).

In order to realize an accurate monitoring of the market, as well as to ensure the compliance with the minimal quality conditions for the services offered by the providers of electronic communications and postal services, ANRC intensified the monitoring and control activity this year. Between January-June 2004, the ANRC personnel performed 876 control actions on the providers of electronic networks and services and 700 control actions on the providers of postal services. 165 breaches were found in the first case, while 47 sanctions were applied to postal service providers, and all the infringements were settled following the notices transmitted by the ANRC agents.

“The most frequent breaches of the law by the providers in both sectors consist of breaking the obligations set out in the general authorisations or in certain decisions of the President of ANRC. Postal services providers were generally found to break rules such as posting the complaint solving procedure or posting the postal services offer with the corresponding tariffs and the working programme”, Ion Smeeianu pointed out.