At the end of last week, the ANRC President, Mr. Dan Cristian Georgescu, and the ANRC Vice-president, Ms. Alexandrina Hirtan, participated in the plenary meeting of the Independent Regulators Group (IRG) and the European Regulators Group for Electronic Communications Networks and Services (ERG), held at Bled, in Slovenia. As a full IRG member and an observer within ERG, ANRC took part in the debates regarding the guidelines for regulating the electronic communications market in Europe.
The representatives of the regulatory authorities attending the sessions of the ERG Plenary Meeting (May, 25-26) decided to intensify their efforts for identifying a harmonised approach at European level regarding the regulation of international roaming services on mobile networks. Over the first 5 months of the current year, ERG has been conducting a detailed analysis concerning these services, based on the data provided by the mobile operators. This analysis revealed that the end-users travelling outside the country hosting the network they subscribe to are paying excessively high tariffs for roaming services, without a clear justification for these tariffs. This is a result of the high tariffs charged by the host-network operator to which the roaming service user subscribes, combined with the considerable net margins applied to roaming calls by the subscriber’s network operator. Moreover, in many cases, the users are not provided clear information on the roaming tariffs.
On grounds of these conclusions, ERG adopted and will launch for consultation a Draft Common Position On Wholesale International Roaming, one of the 18 relevant markets the European Commission recommends for ex ante regulation analysis. Furthermore, the regulatory authorities decided to initiate – at national level – the process of identification and analysis of the wholesale markets of international roaming services on mobile networks. The participants also agreed to establish a project team which should identify the measures required for increasing the users’ awareness of the roaming tariffs. The next ERG plenary meeting will assess the progress made in conducting these market analyses.
The ERG plenary meeting also included a report on the development stage of broadband electronic communications in 13 European states. The report conclusions revealed that competition is a key-incentive for the penetration of broadband services, as promoted by the authorities through regulations on the unbundled access to the local loop. The countries featuring highly competitive markets generally have a greater penetration level of broadband communications services, while the development rate of these services markets proves to be higher as compared to the other countries.
The ERG plenary session also focused on the bitstream access to cable networks, the harmonised approach to implementing the regulatory measures in the ERG member countries, the concept of significant market power, the participants’ experience of defining relevant markets, market analyses and the adoption of regulatory measures, separate accounts and cost accounting, the ERG working programme for 2005 and 2006.
On the 26th and the 27th of May, after the ERG plenary, a seminar assembled both the members and the observers of the Group, who discussed over the challenges faced by the European regulatory authorities in the context of the latest technological developments, which triggered the expansion of broadband electronic communications services, of VoIP and NGN networks, as well as of wireless broadband access.
The next IRG and ERG plenary meetings will be organised at Copenhagen, in Denmark, in the period September 22-23, 2005.
The National Regulatory Authority for Communications (ANRC) became a full member of IRG and an ERG observer in February 2004. The two bodies consist of European regulatory authorities – the ERG also includes the European Commission representatives – and aim to harmonise the regulatory practices in the electronic communications sector at European level.