Today, July 5, 2005, the President of the National Regulatory Authority for Communications, Dan Cristian Georgescu, addressed a keynote in the opening session of the 3rd Edition of the Local Loop Conference, entitled “Broadband Communications – Objectives and Policies, Regulation Strategies and Market Realities”. The event benefited from the presence of representatives of foreign regulatory authorities and represented a good opportunity for the players on both the national and the international markets to exchange ideas and opinions as regards the ways to stimulate access to the local loop in order to develop broadband services.
?In Romania, the evolution of mobile telephony is supported by the low penetration of fixed telephony. Both the latter and the low penetration rate of the broadband Internet access services have been influenced by the delayed implementation of the ISDN technology, since in other countries ISDN is already replaced by more recent technologies”, the President of ANRC, Dan Cristian Georgescu, stated.
By the end of 2004, out of the total number of subscribers to telephony services (both fixed and mobile), 30.05% were fixed telephony subscribers and 69.95% were mobile telephony subscribers. By the same date, the mobile telephony penetration rate was of 47.12%, maintaining its continuous growing trend registered in the previous years, while the fixed telephony penetration rate ranked around 21% and that of Internet services ranked below 5%.
Regarding the DSL technology, as compared to Europe where alternative operators hold between 10% and 30% of the total number of ADSL broadband connections, in Romania, the percentage held by the alternative operators almost reaches 100%, as interest in ensuring access to the local loop is very high.
?Technologies to be found in Romania offer several advantages to the users, for example, the CDMA technology uses broadband connections for the provision of Internet services, while TV cable may be considered, at this point, to be the only reasonable possibility to gain access to high speed Internet services. Nevertheless, special attention must be addressed to stimulating access Internet services and the Authority is ready to support the operators’ efforts in order to correct this actual situation by encouraging the access to the local loop”, Dan Cristian Georgescu declared.