Launch of comments round on case Art 7 Phase II case (DE 2014 1666-1667).

On 24 October 2014, the Commission registered two notifications from the German national regulatory authority, BNetzA, concerning the markets for wholesale voice call termination on individual mobile networks in Germany (corresponding to market 2 in Commission Recommendation 2014/710/EU of 9 October 2014).
The Commission initiated a Phase II investigation, pursuant to Article 7a of Directive 2002/21/EC as amended by Directive 2009/140/EC, with a serious doubts letter on 21 November 2014. In accordance with the BEREC rules of procedure, the Expert Working Group (EWG) was established immediately after that date with the mandate to prepare an independent BEREC opinion on the justification of the Commission’s serious doubts on the case.
Since these cases are very similar to other cases (DE/2013/1424, DE/2013/1527, and DE/2014/1605), the rapporteur decided in agreement with the experts of the EWG and in accordance with point B. III. b) of the Internal Guidelines for the elaboration of BEREC Opinions in Article 7 and 7a Phase II cases (BoR(13) 112) to exercise the work without an initial meeting. Instead, the EWG held a videoconference on 2 December 2014 with the objective of sharing understanding of the notified documents and deciding whether, based on the information available thus far, it could reach clear conclusions on whether or not the Commission’s serious doubts are justified. The EWG reached preliminary conclusions on the issues by analyzing the relevant documents.

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