Draft BEREC Report on Common Characteristics of Layer 2 Wholesale Access Products in the European Union

In recent years several NRAs have imposed access to (active) layer 2 (Ethernet) wholesale access products (hereinafter L2 WAP) as a remedy on the wholesale local access market (Market 4) and/or the wholesale broadband access market (Market 5).

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, this document has the following two objectives:

Firstly, it aims to give an overview of the L2 WAP of the following ten countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom where the imposed L2 WAP is available as well as Germany and the Netherlands where the L2 WAP is not yet available but is or will be imposed.
Secondly, it aims to identify common characteristics of the L2 WAP of these ten countries.

The document covers both L2 WAP with local points of handover (PoH) (also known as virtual unbundled local access (VULA)) and L2 WAP with PoH at higher levels of the network hierarchy, e.g. regional PoH (also known as enhanced bitstream). The analysis is descriptive and does not aim at being normative or recommend a best practice.

The document is published for public consultation, which will run from 8 June to 10 July 2015.

All interested parties are invited to send their contributions by 10 July 2015 to e-mail: [email protected], preferably in English in order to speed up their processing.

For more details on the public consultation, please consult the notice published by BEREC available here.