Network regulation and market development in European telecoms

This CERRE Telecom paper focuses on network regulation issues and on the latter’s interaction with innovation and market developments.

Its main recommendations argue in favour of:

• maintaining wholesale copper prices at current levels and recognising the trade-offs between investment and competition more explicitly in setting access prices for fibre;
• ensuring genuine technological neutrality of regulatory policy;
• taking every step possible to prevent a ’spectrum crunch’ in mobile broadband;
• resisting the temptation of net neutrality and encouraging more varied financial relationships between networks and content an application providers;
• considering data protection and privacy as important policy issues which will affect the deployment of new services; here the task of public authorities is primarily to set out the essential requirements, while the market can develop proper standards and certification schemes.