BEREC Report Case Studies on Migration from POTS/ISDN to IP on the Subscriber Access Line in Europe

In recent years several network operators in Europe started to migrate their networks to NGN/all-IP networks. When fixed networks are migrated to NGN/all-IP networks, also the access network needs to be migrated to IP. Network operators can either migrate the technology used on the subscriber access line (SAL) from POTS/ISDN to IP (VoIP-based SAL) or continue to use POTS/ISDN on the SAL and convert between POTS/ISDN and IP in the multi-service access node (MSAN).

The focus of this report is on migration to VoIP-based SAL since this type of migration may have more impact on the subscribers and may need more regulatory intervention compared to conversion to IP in the MSAN. In order to get a deeper insight into the migration to VoIP-based SAL and to foster the exchange of experiences between NRA this report has the following two objectives.
Firstly, it aims to give an overview of the status of the migration to VoIP-based SAL in Europe on a general level based on information from 31 European countries.
Secondly, it aims to give an overview of the migration to VoIP-based SAL in the network of the incumbent which have already taken place (at least to some extent) based on the experiences of ten countries (Croatia, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland).
The report is descriptive and does not aim to be normative or to recommend best practice.