BEREC published new Guidelines on Articles 4 and 5 of the Roaming Regulation

On 5 July 2013, BEREC published its Guidelines on the application of the Roaming Regulation (EC) No 531/2012 regarding Articles 4 and 5 on the separate sale of roaming.

These Guidelines complement the already existing Guidelines on wholesale access under Article 3, published in September 2012 as well as the Guidelines for the rest of the Articles of Regulation (EC) No 531/2012 published in March 2013.

The Guidelines on Articles 4 and 5 are aimed to clarify all the aspects regarding the application of the separate sale of roaming services which will enter into force on 1 July 2014. BEREC expects that the Guidelines will provide a useful reference for stakeholders in order to implement interfaces and functionalities needed to fulfill the regulation with regard to the separate sale of roaming services, which will be a key issue to encourage competition at the retail level for international roaming services. 

With these Guidelines BEREC has completed the set of Guidelines clarifying the application of the new roaming regulation in force until July 2012. BEREC will update these guidelines in the future in light of having gained new experience on its application, as well as in light of any upcoming review of the roaming regulation or any upcoming new complementary regulation.

Along with the Guidelines, BEREC took note of the Liaison on Terminal and Device behavior to support manual network selection and editing of APN. This document was prepared by the Steering Committee (formally known as the Steering Committee of the Cooperation Platform for the Separate Sale of Roaming Services in the European Union).The Forum has noted that an important contributor to success in allowing customers to choose a separate roaming service is that the terminal, smartphone or device used should be able to both manually select the chosen alternative network and allow for changes to settings to ensure selection of alternative infrastructure.

As for now, BEREC has not received any proposal for new legal provisions on international roaming and therefore has focused its efforts on the application of the existing regulation, which has been in force since 1 July 2013. BEREC in any case will monitor and follow closely any proposal that may complement or amend the existing regulation as a part of the new provisions for the single market initiative and will provide its view in any new proposal in this line.

7 July 2013