BEREC Common Position on Layer 2 Wholesale Access Products

In recent years, several incumbent operators rolled out NGA networks in order to provide higher bandwidths to end users. This leads to situations in which access to physical infrastructure was not considered sufficient to ensure effective competition at the retail level. Therefore, several NRAs have imposed access to (active) Layer 2 (Ethernet) wholesale access products (L2 WAP) as a remedy on the wholesale local access market (market 4/2007, market 3a/2014) or the wholesale broadband access market (market 5/2007, market 3b/2014). In some cases L2 WAP on the wholesale broadband access market were already imposed before the NGA rollout started.In order to get a deeper insight into these products and to foster the exchange of experiences and contribute to the harmonisation of regulatory instruments used in the European Union, BEREC has already analysed L2 WAP in the past years and published the BEREC Report “Common characteristics of L2 WAP in the EU”.
In this document BEREC goes one step further and defines Common Positions for L2 WAP imposed on the wholesale local access market (market 3a) and L2 WAP imposed on the wholesale central access market (market 3b). Common Positions are defined for the conditions for the imposition of L2 WAP, prices and technical characteristics, contributing to the regulatory objective of enabling ANOs to provide a variety of competitive services for residential and business customers (incl. voice, internet, IPTV, data).