Future of fiber network policy: Reviewing NGA debate in Europe

Paper i proceeding, 2011

Moving towards information society is one of political goal of most governments around the world because of its tremendous potential for growth, employment and inclusion. To reach that goal, having a high capacity of broadband networks is regarded as one of the fundamental infrastructure that should be made available to all people in a country. Therefore many policy initiatives and regulatory tools have been implemented in many countries with an aim to increase broadband deployment. Increasing broadband growth in a country results in the growing of opportunity for people to participate or enjoy benefits which has been brought by this network society. Particularly, the European Union has initiated many policies and regulations for more than ten years with an aim to ensure that the EU fully benefits for generations to come from the changes that the information society is bringing. The success of implementing those policies can be observed from being among the world leaders in broadband penetration in many European countries. However, the success of European Union in terms of high broadband penetration is based mostly a on DSL technology which is pushed through telecommunications regulations, such as local loop unbundling (LLU). Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that applications development and more users in information society require more and more of high network capacity which can be pursued efficiently through fiber networks. While the EU enjoys being the world leader of broadband penetration, there is a realization that the EU may fall behind in terms of competitiveness in the global market. Therefore, the new political agenda, the Digital Agenda in Europe, has been initiated with the aim of not only moving towards information society but also to increase competitiveness of the region through having a new fiber-based infrastructure. In this sense, broadband policy is not only a tool to increase broadband deployment in a country or region, but it is also a strategy for future development. The deployment of this new fiber-based network requires substantial investment. Investment decisions depend on a number of factors, and regulatory certainty is clearly one of them. Since then, the Commission Recommendation on regulated access to Next Generation Access Networks (NGA) has been put forth to provide regulatory certainty for new investments, while at the same time building a continued consistent approach for competition in telecommunication, in line with previous initiatives on LLU. The main focus of the paper is to discuss the aspect of the NGA recommendation in serving both strategic agenda goal by encouraging a new investment and sector agenda goal by increasing penetration through competition mechanism. To that end, the paper will analyze the NGA in the EU based on a conceptual model that addresses the interaction between the strategic and sector agenda.