Public consultation on draft BEREC Report on Access to physical infrastructure in the context of market analysis

During its 37th plenary meeting (5-7 December 2018, Prague) the Board of Regulators has approved the draft BEREC Report on access to physical infrastructure in market analyses for public consultation.

The EU needs significant investment in next generation access (NGA) networks that are capable of supporting a wide range of services in order to meet the needs of end-users (both residential and business consumers). Physical infrastructure (such as ducts and poles used to deploy networks) represents a significant proportion of the investment in NGA networks. Civil engineering works are lengthy and costly processes, for instance due to the need to gather the necessary permissions and the intensive use of human resources, among other issues. Moreover, replicating existing physical infrastructure is sometimes not technically feasible and, in many cases, not economically profitable. Measures aimed at facilitating greater use of existing physical infrastructure can reduce the civil engineering works required to deploy new networks, significantly lowering costs.

In this context, most NRAs in the EEA currently regulate access to physical infrastructure in the market for wholesale local access provided at a fixed location (market 3a). Some NRAs also regulate access to physical infrastructure in market 3b or market 4.  BEREC has not previously studied how NRAs have chosen to precisely address access to physical infrastructure in their market analyses. Therefore, following a questionnaire completed by NRAs, this report depicts the different approaches taken regarding the regulation of access to physical infrastructure.

The public consultation ran from 12 December 2018 to 23 January 2019.

All stakeholders were invited to submit their contributions via the BEREC online public consultation tool. The contributions could also be sent to the following e-mail address. 

In accordance with the BEREC policy on public consultations, BEREC will publish a summary of all received contributions, respecting confidentiality requests. All contributions will be published on the BEREC website, taking into account requests for confidentiality and publication of personal data. Any such requests should clearly indicated which information is considered confidential.