30 October 2013
Veritel.ro – the online application for comparing telecom offers developed by ANCOM – enabled today’s visitors of the Future Communities//Open Innovation Fair 2013 to choose from among 3.5 million offers of fixed and mobile telephony and broadband internet access services. Having attended the opening ceremony at the National Library of Romania, Ms. Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission and Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, and Mr. Dacian Cioloș, the European Commissioner for Agriculture (photo), appreciated the functionalities of Veritel.ro.
Veritel.ro is an independent and non-commercial tool developed by ANCOM and financed from EU grants. Visiting www.veritel.ro, the users may take three simple steps to find the communications services offer that best fits their consumption needs: pick the desired services, estimate consumption and receive a list of 25 offers that correspond to the estimated needs, ranked by price.
”Accurate and thorough information contributes to users’ empowerment and to capacitating them to better defend their interests, while stimulating competition. Better informed users, who are prepared to make a choice, exert a necessary pressure on the providers, incentivizing them to offer services at increasingly competitive tariffs. Thus, the consumers who make informed choices on the one hand benefit from and – on the other – foster competition”, the ANCOM President, Mr. Cătălin Marinescu, declared at the Future Communities//Open Innovation Fair 2013.
The necessity that the regulators make available to the users of communications services such interactive tools or similar comparison applications that enable them to identify the tariff package that is best suited for their consumption needs is stipulated in the European legislation. In Romania, Veritel.ro was developed based on the ANCOM President’s Decision no.77/2009 on the obligations of informing the end-users incumbent on the providers of publicly available electronic communications services.
The project “Online application for comparing the communications offers intended for the end-users” was implemented by ANCOM within Operation 1 “Supporting the setting-up of e-government solutions”, Key Area of Intervention 2 “Developing and increasing the efficiency of electronic public services”, Priority Axis 3 “Information Technology and Communications for the private and public sectors”, under the Sectorial Operational Programme “Increase of Economic Competitiveness”, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund.
Future Communities//Open Innovation Fair 2013, a show exhibiting solutions of innovation through technology for the development of the communities in Romania, is initiated by the Biblionet programme and by the Ministry for the Information Society, under the high patronage of the Government of Romania, and is held between 30 October – 1 November at the National Library of Romania. Public access to the Future Communities Open Innovation Fair is free, being open Wednesday, starting 12.00, as well as Thursday and Friday from 09.00 to 18.00.