Press release: BEREC publishes its draft Work Programme for 2016 for public consultation

On 1-2 October BEREC held its 3rd Plenary meeting of the year in Riga, Latvia.
BEREC hasnowlaunched a public consultation on its draft Work Programme for 2016. The draft Work Programme will also be on the agenda of BEREC’s forthcoming Stakeholder Forum, to be held in Brussels on 15 October, and the consultation will close on 30 October.

Following the plenary meeting, BEREC also launched several other public consultations. The first, which closes on 6 November, is on BEREC’s draft report on the Internet of Things (IoT), which describes the state of play of M2M services and identifies some distinct characteristics of M2M services, assessing whether they might need specific regulatory treatment.
The second consultation, which closes on 2 November, is on BEREC’s report on Over-the-Top (OTT) services. It seeks to provide a framework for understanding online-based services and market players considers the potential impact of OTT on the regulatory framework and lays the foundations for further BEREC work in this area in 2016.
The third consultation, which closes on 30 October, is on BEREC’s report on how equivalent access and choice for disabled end users are dealt with by NRAs across Europe.

Other outcomes of the plenary meeting included: BEREC published its report on the common characteristics of Layer 2 wholesale access products, based on which it intends to develop a Common Position on Layer 2 wholesale access products during 2016. BEREC also published the latest Annual Regulatory Accounting report, which shows a continued trend towards increasingly consistent approaches to regulatory accounting and a stabilisation in approaches to cost valuation and cost allocation among NRAs. A full list of the documents adopted at the BEREC Plenary, including its latest international roaming benchmark report (October 2014-March 2015), is available here.

This was the third BEREC Plenary meeting under the chairmanship of Fátima Barros, President of the Board of the Portuguese regulator, ANACOM.