BEREC Guidelines on Very High Capacity Networks (2023)

These BEREC Guidelines, designed in accordance with Article 82 of the European Electronic Communications Code (EECC)^[1] .

Guidelines are drafted to provide guidance to NRAs ‘on the criteria that a network is to fulfil in order to be considered a very high capacity network, in particular in terms of down- and uplink bandwidth, resilience, error-related parameters, and latency and its variation’ (Art. 82).

NRAs shall take these Guidelines into utmost account.^[2]The Guidelines shall contribute to the harmonisation of the definition of the term ‘very high capacity network’ in the EU.

BEREC published the first version of these Guidelines in 2020 and determined that any network which fulfils one (or more) of four criteria is a very high capacity network.

However, at that time it was not yet possible to take 5G fully into account, as it had not yet reached mature deployment and significant penetration. Therefore, in this new version of the Guidelines, BEREC updates criterion 4 (performance thresholds for wireless network) based on data collected from mobile network operators on 5G, while the other three criteria remain unchanged.