On Thursday, October 16, 2003, Radu Tudorache, Director of the Economic Market Regulation Division within the National Regulatory Authority for Communications (ANRC) held a presentation during the Biz Days event, at the conference entitled "The effects of the telecommunications market liberalization on the business environment ". The ANRC representative described the regulations the Authority carried out on the electronic communications market during its first year of activity, underlying the effects these measures had on the development of the market, as well as on the business users.
The measures ANRC adopted so far were intended to facilitate the market entry of new operators by eliminating the legal and structural barriers, on the one hand, and to balance the competitive positions by regulating the wholesale markets, on the other hand. ANRC identified the operators with significant power on the relevant markets and imposed certain obligations, such as transparency, non-discrimination or cost orientation of tariffs for access and interconnection in order to ensure access of all the operators to the essential facilities and to the end user.
The effects of these measures are the decrease of tariffs for international calls, advantageous offers and the diversification of the services provided to the business users, the entry on the market of alternative fixed operators with their own subscribers and of operators that provide advantageous packages of electronic communications integrated services (telephony, Internet, data transmissions and audiovisual programmes).
The year 2003 is characterized by the boom of the prepaid international VoIP telephone services, the tariffs charged by the newly entered operators being 60% lower than the tariffs of the incumbent.
Following a series of requests from the industry, in addition to the Carrier Selection interconnection, which is detailed in the Reference Interconnection Offer (RIO), ANRC proposed a RIO update concerning interconnection in order to provide access to Intelligence Networks. The ex-ante decision is currently submitted for public consultations and will be finalised in November.
„For the year 2004 we expect an increase of investments, a diversification of services and an improvement in their quality. We especially focus on the development of alternative long-distance telephone services and value added services. It is true that the main beneficiaries will still be the business users, but we expect notable effects with regard to the residential users!”, declared Radu Tudorache.
The ANRC Director for economic regulation showed that, in the context of the law for universal service entering into force, ANRC will concentrate in the near future on the retail markets. ANRC launched a preliminary public consultation on the identification of specific relevant retail markets, the markets proposed for consultation being the same as those recommended by the European Commission. Radu Tudorache underlined the fact that, according to the new law on universal service, ANRC will be able to define “a set of minimal leased lines” with harmonized features the business users will benefit from, so that the lack of telecommunications infrastructure will not constitute an obstacle in the economic development of certain geographic regions.
The full text presented today by the Director of Economic Market Division of ANRC may be consultated here.