5th BEREC Stakeholder Forum
On 18 October in Brussels BEREC held its 5th Stakeholder forum where stakeholders from telecoms and digital environments gathered to exchange views on topics which appear crucial for the future of these environments, in particular in a context of intense legislative debate on the regulatory framework review.The forum provided the opportunity in particular to discuss on the best regulatory approaches to promote new models of investment and competition, at a time when investments in very-high capacity network are crucial for the emergence of the Gigabit society.
This 5th Stakeholder forum also aimed at considering, in another roundtable, the way regulators should balance setting consumer safeguards with the need to foster innovation, when the convergence of content and traditional electronic communication services and the emergence of new players in this market offer new opportunities to consumers but might also create new regulatory challenges.
Roundtables were moderated by Henk Don (ACM, The Netherlands) and Sara Andersson (PTS, Sweden).
Speakers for the first roundtable included Maxime Lombardini, CEO of Iliad; Brad Burnham, Co-founder of Union Square Ventures; Filipa Carvalho, Director for Regulation of NOS; Alastair Davidson, Director of Wireless Infrastructure Group (UK mobile wholesale network provider); Richard Feasey, Independent Consultant.
The second roundtable benefited from the views of Kevin Martin, Vice-president of Facebook; Michael Bryan-Brown, Managing Director at Liberty Global; Guillermo Beltrà, BEUC and David Jevons, Partner at Oxera.
On this occasion, Johannes Gungl, BEREC incoming Chair, also presented the key work areas of BEREC next year, which include a focus on 5G deployment and the promotion of innovation in network technologies.
Sébastien Soriano, BEREC Chair 2017 gave a keynote speech between the two roundtables.
Steve Unger, BEREC Vice-Chair 2017 gave the welcome address and Commissioner Andrus Ansip made the closing remarks.
BEREC Stakeholder Forum was open to the public and live-streamed on the BEREC website. Everyone was invited to ask questions to the speakers or react on the discussions via Twitter #BERECforum.