Last week the the Industry, Research and Energy Committee (ITRE) and the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO) of the European Parliament voted on the European Commission's proposals to reform European telecoms regulations.
To sum up, the parliamentary committees accepted a number of key proposals, including the addition of functional separation to the toolbox of national regulators to stimulate competition. This would give the national regulator the power to require a dominant operator to separate its access network infrastructure and service arms, in order to give other competitors a fair chance to offer services using that infrastructure.
This is a big deal, according to Heavy Reading's Graham Finnie, who asks if functional separation is Europe's secret weapon. But it's not clear, to me at least, who that weapon will be used against.
Functional separation will be invoked as a remedy to ensure competition, competition drives down consumer broadband prices, and that would propel Europe to the front line of the broadband revolution. It's worked out quite well here in the UK, where BT hived off its copper access network into a separate entity, Openreach, back in 2005.
BT, however, has indicated that being forced to share new fibre infrastructure would be a huge disincentive to rolling out a national fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network. Clearly the remedy of functional separation must be handled very carefully if Europe is to avoid shooting itself in the foot when it comes to next-generation access.
As an aside, while I totally agree with Finnie that the European Comission's internet portal is not for the faint-heated, I'm feeling rather smug because I have found a short-cut via EU telecoms commissioner Vivane Reding's homepage, which highlights the key developments in telecoms regulations.
But back to last week's vote. Things didn't all go Reding's way. Although the parliamentary committees voted in favour of creating a new body composed of independent telecoms regulators, to be called the Body of European Regulators for Telecommunications (BERT), it appears that this new structure has substantially less powers than originally proposed. There also seem to be a question mark over how it will be funded. On top of that it has a rather unfortunate acronym that conjures up the image of a geriatric with a white stick — not what they intended I'm sure.
