International Roaming BEREC Input to EC request

On 9 April the Euroepan Commission (EC) EC wrote a letter to the BEREC Chair requesting BEREC’s advice for assessing the state of the wholesale roaming market and defining the so-called fair use criteria for the use of roaming services. In the letter, the necessity to initiate the work on fair use as well as on the wholesale review was requested, hoping that this would contribute to well-informed discussions between the EC and the co-legislators after the EP elections.

The current document provides the preliminary views of BEREC to be used for drafting the final BEREC answers to the questions raised by the EC. The analyses are based on answers to a questionnaire that BEREC received from almost 140 operators in Europe as well as data submitted by all NRAs.The document provides an update of the wholesale cost estimations based on the methodology used in the International Mobile Roaming Report from December 2010. Furthermore it consists of answers to the specific questions the EC raised: on the availability for all operators to offer RLAH services on a sustainable basis, on the need for appropriate criteria for the use of wholesale roaming access, on the need for settlement arrangements for termination of regulated roaming calls, on the need for fair remuneration for traffic imbalances and on the economies of scale legitimately derived by roaming providers.

Finally, BEREC identifies Fair Use Policies (FUPs) at the retail level, taking into account the criteria the EP proposed but also the consequences RLAH might have on the domestic markets.