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The 11th CEPT Conference was held in Nice 22-24 October 2003. Four workshops were held in the afternoon of 21 October.
Some of the main ideas, proposals and conclusions presented at the conference are outlined below.
The new EU regulatory framework:
· The keynote address from ERG Chairman Prof. J. Arnbak presented the philosophy and process of implementing the new regulatory framework and made some suggestions for further improving the process, e.g. the possible need to address the divergence of relevant court rulings across EU countries
· The main challenge of implementation is the harmonising of regulators’ approaches, but harmonisation is only appropriate where it promotes competition and consumer interests
· For EU accession countries, the task of formal transposition of the new framework and the required market analysis may be a lesser priority than first step measures such as carrier selection.
International co-operation:
· The presentations by ETSI, EICTA, ETNO, CEC and ECC highlighted the importance of international co-operation to ensure continued advancement of telecommunication services, proliferation of broadband, success of e-Europe initiatives etc
· All international organisations need to be active in monitoring each others’ activities and in contributing actively
· Standardisation is one of the key areas where the involvement of all players – administrations as well as industry – should guarantee the creation of neutral, yet evolutionary standards.
Market trends and challenges, industry crisis:
· Telecommunications is becoming a basic utility, like electricity and water
· The industry crisis was caused by too many companies entering the telecommunications market and over-capacity, ending in many companies disappearing in bankruptcy
· The demand for telecommunications services has continued to grow steadily despite the industry crisis, meaning that the future of business is promising as long as the number of service providers and their business cases correspond to actual demand
· The culture of both industry and regulators needs to move from being technology based to being service based
· Telecom users, their needs and interests should be the cornerstone of future telecommunications business development
· The next generation networks being created by fixed and mobile network operators as a “paid Internet” may not be able to compete with the existing “free Internet”
· Business models for development of e-services are still immature.
Promoting broadband deployment:
· Broadband development is a key to economic growth and the success of the next advanced services phase of telecommunications development
· Cross-platform broadband deployment is the best way to promote proliferation of broadband
· Experience from other regions show that active commitment and strong political will from governments is of paramount importance during the initial phases of broadband deployment, until critical masses of service providers and users are reached.
General regulatory trends and challenges:
· Regulations should be made more flexible, adaptive and proportionate
· In many cases this may be achieved by implementing market-based regulatory approaches such as secondary spectrum trading for radio spectrum management and creating voluntary regulatory schemes such as telecommunications ombudsman institutions, etc
· Trends towards co-regulation and self-regulation are increasingly visible, and these processes have already been set up and are functioning successfully in several European countries
· National and EU law and jurisdiction may not cope with new Internet-based services which ignore national borders
· Emerging Internet identification schemes may require regulatory attention.
Radio spectrum management challenges:
· More flexibility in spectrum management is needed, and all parties agree that attention should be given to striking the right balance between flexibility of de-regulation (“commons”) and the long-term certainty of harmonisation provided by traditional “command and control” approach
· Spectrum management reform has not yet started in earnest, and regulators should develop a strategy for achieving this in Europe as soon as possible. The experience of other regions, presented at the conference, may be used as a good starting point
· Spectrum trading may be the main vehicle of introducing new flexibility to spectrum management. Prospects of introducing spectrum trading in Europe should be addressed urgently, taking note of experience gained in other countries
· The World Radio Conference process has worked very satisfactorily up to now, as testified by the success of WRC-03. Thus preparation for WRC-07 should follow the already established path of European preparations (co-operation between the CEPT Conference Preparatory Group and the European Commission), while paying due regard to establishing an efficient liaison with other regions.
New technologies and trends:
· The introduction of digital TV will be one of the main challenges for spectrum managers in the next few years, calling for active international co-operation and consensus building; advanced experience in some countries (e.g. the German case study presented at the conference) should be used by others to facilitate the transition to digital
· Wireless devices will, in the future, be pre-dominantly multi-service, combining voice, data, multimedia and broadcast receiver capabilities. Convergence by means of providing broadcast and mobile communications services to a single terminal, still questioned by some parties, would require united efforts by all involved: content providers, broadcasters and network operators as well as regulators and manufacturers
· The introduction of new applications, such as Ultra Wide Band and Software Defined Radio, should be addressed by regulators and some proportionate measures should be agreed for their regulation
· 3G is already happening, and the first UMTS networks are being deployed in Europe. Given the difficult start, regulators should be receptive to operators’ calls for assistance in terms of reviewing licence conditions or setting new regulatory measures aimed at easing the deployment of 3G networks.
>>> See the presentations at 11th CEPT Conference
>>> Download the 11th CEPT Conference programme in PDF |