Anticipating proposals expected before the summer, EU Information Society commissioner Viviane Reding said yesterday (24 June) she is in favour of setting a "risk premium of around 15%" to reward operators investing in high-speed internet infrastructure.
Under the plans, companies investing in fibre networks would be able to charge extra fees to competitors wishing to use their infrastructure.
However, the European Commisison is still divided on the issue and is still "discussing the final details" of the proposal, Reding said at a workshop organised in Brussels by ECTA, the trade association representing new telecom operators.
Neelie Kroes, the commissioner in charge of competition policy, is particularly sceptical at Reding's suggestion. "As of today, the Commission is not in a position to accurately quantify this risk premium," Kroes said according to the FT, adding it would be "counterproductive" to fix a single rate of return across the whole of Europe.
French EU presidency to focus on social aspects
At the ECTA workshop, Emmanuel Gabla, Director of the IT section within the French Ministry of Economics, underlined that NGNs is one of the priority of the French EU presidency, which starts in July. He said France had already made a decision to equip every new house with fibre cables from 2012.
The French Presidency will also focus on the potentially negative social consequences of the new prospected investments. Indeed the uneven deployment of NGAN risks widening the digital divide, Gabla said. Universal access to broadband will therefore be a key target for France, he added.
The best model to invest in NGANs has still to be found but Sweden emerges as one example that could be replicated. With a demographic density of 2 inhabitants per square kilometer in some areas, Sweden is now third worldwide in terms of broadband penetration - after Japan and South Korea – thanks to equally shared public-private investments.
In the rest of Europe, it is clear that there will be a need for public money to cover remote zones but it is still not certain who in the private sector will bear the costs. A study released at the ECTA conference and prepared by WIK Consult, underline that incumbents have a structural competitive advantage in the nascent market of broadband services. Therefore, it should be up to them to invest in the new networks, the study argued. ETNO, the association which represents the incumbents’ interests, dismiss the findings as premature.
