Public consultation on Draft BEREC guidelines on geographical surveys. Verification of information.

These draft guidelines are provided by BEREC in response to the task set in Article 22 (7) of the Directive (EU) 2018/1972 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11^th December 2018 establishing the European Electronic Communications Code (hereinafter EECC) to assist national regulatory authorities (NRAs) and/or other competent authorities (OCAs) on the consistent application of geographical surveys of network deployments (hereinafter GS of ND).

According to Article 22 of the EECC, NRAs and/or other competent authorities shall conduct a geographical survey of the reach of electronic communications networks capable of delivering broadband (“broadband networks”) by 21 December 2023 and shall update it at least every 3 years.

BEREC delivers these guidelines in two phases.

In February 2020, following its obligation under Article 22, BEREC issued the core Guidelines^[1] establishing a series of information that MS have to deliver in order to characterize the network and performance of electronic communication networks capable of delivering broadband. 

During 2020 BEREC is working on phase 2 which includes 2 different tasks:

a) Guidelines regarding verification, including QoS2 and QoS3 information to verify QoS1 information.

b)  Guidelines on the procedures to invite undertakings and public authorities to declare their intention to deploy VHCNs over the duration of the relevant forecast period (Art 22.2, 22.3 and Art 22.4)

This public consultation is regarding task a) only (i.e. BEREC guidelines for verification of information).

In the current Draft Guidelines, BEREC deals with the verification of QoS-1 indicators as defined in the Core Guidelines. This is the verification of the current reach of broadband networks and the quality of the services that they could offer as declared by the operator, including the verification of the declaration of an area or grid as being covered with a VHCN. The validation of address databases and the verification of information regarding planned deployments is out of the scope of the current Guidelines.

The Draft Guidelines describe different verification methods and provide recommendations to be considered by Authorities when assessing the quality of QoS-1 data provided by operators. Authorities may choose verification methods depending on the information available and their needs. The Guidelines stress that Authorities should publish their verification methodologies and outline the verification results in order to establish transparency and help make their proceedings plausible to market participants.

The document has the following structure:

1. Chapter 1 sets out the legal background and explains a purpose and complexity of quality assurance process.
2. Chapter 2 specifies the verification for fixed broadband and mobile broadband.
3. Chapter 3 – Chapter 5 describes the process of ensuring the quality of data: (1) internal validation; (2) use of third parties to find out about inaccuracies in data; (3) verification, where the data is contrasted against external sources of data; (4) decision regarding data accuracy.
4. Chapter 6 talks about requirements to be set for transparency and accountability.

To this end, stakeholders are invited to comment and provide their views on the different chapters of the Guidelines following their structure.

Practical details of the public consultation

In accordance with the BEREC policy on public consultations, BEREC will publish a summary of all received contributions, respecting confidentiality requests.

The public consultation will run from 15 of December 2020 to 27 January 2021. 

All stakeholders are invited to submit their contributions to the following e-mail address: PC_Guidelines_GS_Verification@berec.europa.eu  Further enquiries about the consultation may also be submitted to this address.

The overall size of the e-mail (including attachments) should not be larger than 2 MB. 

Important! After submitting the contribution via e-mail, an automatic reply will be generated. If this confirmation e-mail is not received, the submission of the contribution was not successful and it should be submitted again.

We strongly encourage all stakeholders to submit their contributions as early as possible. Contributions received after the above mentioned deadline will not be taken into account.

Contributions should preferably be sent in English. 

In order to facilitate processing of the responses, the comments provided should clearly refer to the certain paragraphs/structure of the document.

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 indicate which information should be considered confidential.