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Regulation killing NGN investment

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Tue, 10/11/2011 - 11:13
#1
kbarrins
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Joined: 10/11/2011
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Regulation killing NGN investment

Is reaching for the hypothetical delivering an unwelcome reality?

Over regulation in Europe?

http://www.acassconsult.com/attachments/File/Acass_Regulatory_Monitor_-_...

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Thu, 01/05/2012 - 11:49
#2
Manchitas
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Joined: 12/29/2011
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Regulation killing NGN investment

Hello,

The main problem in Europe is that you cannot have everything so regulators much chose the side they want to move the balance. From one point of view, they think that if they don’t impose strong access obligations, dominant operators (old public telco companies) will create monopolistic scenarios. From the other point of view, imposing access obligations they decrease the attractive of invest on network deployments.

I think that, in many countries one of the main problems is that, apart of the special case of the mobile market (that is more recent), regulatory agencies promoted service competitive markets instead of network competitive markets because it was the easier and faster way to ensure competition. The result is that now, almost nobody except the old public companies can deploy big (national) NGA fixed networks. The only way that other companies have to enter in the NGA market is to deploy local networks on localized areas where the return of investment is bigger. In addition, old public companies are quite comfortable with the current situation and they don’t see many reasons to deploy new optical fiber access networks because the user demand still low, they already have the market (because they have most part of the clients and in addition they have incomes from services that they must give to other operators) and they worry about future regulatory impositions (it doesn’t worth to risk millions to create a new service market if at the next day they are going to said that you are monopolist and you must give open access).

Obviously the problem around NGA networks is far more complicated but I think that the solution can came from a functional separation of traditional telco operators splitting their business in transport services and final user access. This way the market can better regulate itself and there are incentives for investment on NGA. Anyway functional separation is a complex topic, it also has negative effects and must be discussed in detail.

Regards,

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