Launch of a comments round of a BEREC electronic voting procedure for the adoption of the BEREC Opinion on Article 7 Phase II Case FR/2014/1670

On 28 October 2014, the Commission registered a notification by the French Regulatory Authority, Autorité de Régulation des Communications Electroniques et des Postes (ARCEP), concerning the wholesale markets for (i) call termination on individual public telephone networks provided at fixed location, (ii) voice call termination on individual mobile networks, and (iii) for SMS termination in Metropolitan France and overseas territories.
In the notified draft measure, ARCEP defines a separate SMS termination market for the provision of termination services in each mobile operator’s network. All mobile operators are proposed to be designated with SMP on their respective market. The obligations of access, transparency, non-discrimination and price control will be imposed on all SMP operators active on the territories covered by the present analysis.
On 28 November 2014, the Commission sent a serious doubts letter opening a phase II investigation pursuant to Article 7 of Directive 2002/21/EC as amended by Directive 2009/140/EC.
In compliance with the provisions of Article 13 of the Rules of Procedure of the Board of Regulators the BEREC Office established a dedicated Expert Working Group (EWG) composed of experts from the National Regulatory Authorities and the BEREC Office and chaired by a Rapporteur from ACM. The EWG examined the notification by ARCEP and the arguments of the Commission and prepared a draft BEREC Opinion, which was submitted to the Board of Regulators for comments as part of the an urgent electronic voting procedure. The comments round started on 17 December and will finish on 19 December 2014. It will be followed by a voting round.

The current document is part of the internal BEREC decision making process and therefore is not available to the public.