02 May 2011
“Online application for comparing the communications offers intended for the end-users”
Sector Operational Programme "Increase of Economic Competitiveness" – co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund –
“Investments for your future”
15.03.2011
The President of ANCOM, Mr. Cătălin Marinescu, and the Minister of Communications and Information Society, Mr. Valerian Vreme, signed at the Ministry’s headquarters the Non-reimbursable Financing Contract for the creation of the online application enabling the end-users to compare between the electronic communications offers.
“ANCOM has been eagerly waiting for this moment. For us, the contract signing equals the beginning of a project we have been working on for several years and responds to a need the end-users expressed countless times: i.e. to compare easy and fast the offers existing on the market in order to be able to make a choice well informed and best suited to a certain person’s communication needs”, the President of ANCOM stated on this occasion. The obtained non-reimbursable financing amounts to 886,198.32 lei and was awarded following the ANCOM submission of a project within the Sectoral Operational Programme “Increase of Economic Competitiveness”.
ANCOM is continuously striving to offer the users tools whereby to enable them to better manage their relation with the providers of communications services, the decision concerning the electronic communications providers’ obligations to inform the end-users being one of the decisions adopted by the Authority to this end. One of the provisions under Decision no.77/2009 obligates the operators to provide ANCOM with the information necessary for the Authority to create and make publicly available a web portal which would allow the tariffs and terms offered by the providers of mobile telephony, fixed telephony, and broadband Internet access to be compared by means of a „price calculator”-type interactive application. The application will enable the user to insert a set of consumption options and will carry out a comparative analysis of the offers existing on the market (introduced in the database), ranking afterwards the most advantageous offers as price is concerned, in direct connection to the options expressed by the user.
A number of studies – commissioned by ANCOM and conducted by Gallup in 2010 on the evolution of the main indicators in the electronic communications sector for the services of fixed telephony, mobile telephony, Internet access and television programme retransmission provided to residential end-users, and, respectively, of fixed telephony, mobile telephony and Internet access provided to business end-users – showed that few Romanian users are aware of the tariffs of the electronic communications services they benefit from.
These studies were aimed at identifying the consumption behaviour and highlighting the features of the demand for electronic communications services, and were conducted on a representative sample of 5,983 natural persons and 2,832 companies and public institutions.
The conclusions of the studies are attached hereto, and the studies are available for consultation on the Authority’s website, here.