Fixed Telecoms Tracker
Expanded to enable the comparison of wholesale broadband access regulation across 19 countries
We’ve expanded our Fixed Telecoms Tracker to compare wholesale broadband access regulation across a wider set of countries. Our benchmark now includes details of regulatory decisions, drawing directly from the latest rounds of market reviews, for 19 European countries. Recent statements from several former incumbents, including Openreach in the UK, have stressed the importance of getting regulation right in order to support ongoing fibre investments – including removing obligations where competition is present. Our benchmarks show that, following the most recent analysis of wholesale local access (WLA) – Market 1 of the EC’s 2020 Recommendation on relevant markets, eight countries have now deregulated local loop and sub-loop unbundling (LLU/SLU), with a further four removing regulation in competitive geographic areas.
Despite the trend towards partial or even full deregulation of copper access, our research finds that most countries (13) continue to impose duct and/or pole access obligations, typically through WLA decisions or via a standalone physical infrastructure access (PIA) market review, with the PTS in Sweden the only regulator studied to have removed requirements for duct access. Similarly, the majority of regulators have imposed fibre unbundling (12) and/or virtual unbundled local access (VULA, 11) obligations, usually on a singular operator considered to hold significant market power (SMP) and either on a national basis or for a significant part of the country where competition has yet to take root. Cable networks have occasionally formed part of the retail market definition but less so at the wholesale level. They have therefore tended to fall beyond the scope of ex-ante regulation, except in the case of two countries: Belgium and Denmark.
According to our Tracker, terminating segments of leased lines (representing wholesale dedicated capacity (WDC) – Market 2 of the EC’s 2020 Recommendation) are regulated in 11 countries, although there are defined locations within five (Austria, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, UK) where SMP designations and associated obligations do not apply. Access to dark fibre is regulated in 12 countries, either through the WDC or WLA market reviews. In contrast, wholesale central access (WCA) – formerly Market 3(b) of the EC’s 2014 Recommendation – presents a notably mixed picture. Only five countries (Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Poland) continue to regulate bitstream access over the copper network, potentially reflecting the EC’s conclusion that the WCA market no longer warrants ex-ante regulation. However, those five countries plus a further three (Estonia, Norway, Portugal), i.e. eight in total, regulate bitstream access over fibre.
