RD431 - ETNO Contribution to the BEREC Draft Report on “Challenges and Drivers of NGA Rollout and Infrastructure Competition” – BoR (16) 96



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Introduction
ETNO has read with interest the BEREC Draft Report on “Challenges and Drivers of NGA Rollout and Infrastructure Competition”. We welcome the opportunity to provide our comments to the document.


Full document here

Introduction

ETNO has read with interest the BEREC Draft Report on “Challenges and Drivers of NGA Rollout and Infrastructure Competition”. We welcome the opportunity to provide our comments to the document.

The draft report aims at analysing the drivers of NGA deployment across Europe. Identifying and assessing the main factors behind NGA rollout is very important. Massive EU-wide deployment of NGA networks should be a key policy goal for EU and national policy-makers and should be underpinned by sound analysis.

To achieve this policy goal, it is worth recalling that the huge investments required will have to mainly come from the private sector. Only in order to reach the Digital Agenda Target for 100 Mbps take-up by 2020, it is estimated that around 100 billion euros of additional investments will need to be put in place between now and 20201.

Of course, the investment required to achieve the desirable goals of a “Gigabit Society” and a 5G-Europe, as recently outlined by Commissioner Oettinger2, would be much higher.

As the European Commission is about to reform its regulatory framework for electronic communications, we need to ask ourselves two questions: what are the main factors affecting NGA rollout? And in the light of these, how can the EU design a policy environment which favors massive NGA deployment, in the interest of European end-users and European competitiveness?

Our comments to this draft report are guided by these two overarching questions.

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See The Boston Consulting Group, “Five Priorities for Achieving Europe’s Digital Single Market”. The European Commission pointed out a similar figure in its Roadmap on the “Evaluation and Reform of the Regulatory Framework for Electronic Communications Networks and Services”.

2 See here