The FTTH Council Europe believes that competition drives investment and our regulatory positions are aimed at striking the right balance between supporting competition between all stakeholders and fostering a favourable environment for investors to play an active role in building future-proof fibre networks.
Traditionally, competition was created through regulation by granting access to challenger operators to the former incumbent network so that competitors could deliver their own services. The new European Electronic Communication Code (EECC) slightly shifted this approach by introducing a new investment objective of promoting connectivity, access to and take-up of Very High-Capacity networks (VHCN) by all EU citizens and businesses, in addition to the 3 pre-existing regulatory objectives of promoting competition, promoting the internal market and promoting EU citizens’ interests.
This new investment objective guarantees that any access obligations take into account the risks incurred by investing operators while ensuring competition.
Finally, the FTTH Council Europe believes that a geographically differentiated approach between urban areas where existing infrastructure can easily be duplicated (and therefore infrastructure-based competition makes sense) and less dense areas is the best approach. The key to this is a predictable and stable regulatory framework aimed at guaranteeing adequate return of investment for these long-term network roll-out plans when they focus on VHCN and overbuild protection of the investments made by operators.