ERG Wants Stronger European Single Telecoms Market
At its plenary session in Gothenburg, Sweden, the European Regulators Group (ERG) decided to focus on new areas to strengthen the European single electronic communications market.
Spectrum will be a key issue for the future development of the telecoms sector and is a key component of the Framework Review. For this reason the I/ERG and the Radio Spectrum Policy Group (RSPG) held a joint meeting where they decided to strengthen their cooperation and work together in a structured manner.
The ERG has adopted a common position recommending symmetry within fixed call termination rates and mobile call termination rates (MTRs) respectively.
The European regulators also agreed on continuing the immediate and systematic work on costing methodologies to set mobile termination rates, which will lead to decreasing prices and narrow down differences of MTRs across countries further. The results are to become public soon.
On roaming, an ERG project team is already responsible for analyzing data roaming and text roaming markets and will also examine the scale of per minute billing for voice roaming.
The ERG reaffirmed its commitment to ensure and deliver on regulatory consistency across the European telecoms market. Based on its system put in place last year to monitor the implementation of its Common Positions by NRAs, the ERG approved the report on compliance of application of Common Position on Broadband and has decided to develop an action plan on the implementation on its Common Position on VoIP.
The European regulators unanimously agreed that there is an immediate need for clearer price information for communication services. The ERG has agreed that regarding transparency for customers, Member States and regulators can learn from each other as various systems and mechanisms to ensure transparency already exist in Europe. The ERG will collect and analyze these best practices with a view to further empowering consumers.
Following substantial work by the responsible project team as well as a public consultation on the issue, ERG has adopted a Common Position on wholesale leased line remedies to be published later this month. This document will help improve consistency of remedies across the European telecoms market.
See also: debriefing 24th ERG Plenary
Source: ERG
