European Regulators Search for Common VoIP Regulatory Regime
BONN -- European nations should coordinate their regulation of VoIP, regulators contended here Sun. at a forum hosted by the German Regulatory Authority for Telecom & Post (RegTP). “The Danish industry is afraid of ‘island’ solutions,” said Jorgen Andersen, dir. gen. of Danish regulator NITA. “VoIP is an international phenomenon, and national singular approaches would be bad for the German market,” said Iris Henseler-Unger, RegTP vp. Still, European regulators are by no means unanimous on how to proceed with VoIP regulation.
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Finding a common answer to VoIP is critical, said Fabio Colasanti, dir. gen. of the EU Commission. Therefore, he said national regulators should refrain from drawing final conclusions until consultations in other member states, and EU-wide consultation, have finished. The Commission has received more than 90 statements and is preparing common guidelines for VoIP in Europe to be presented before year-end, said Colasanti. “We have a very interesting situation,” he said, “that is testing … regulators in Europe and beyond, the work of regulators as a group.”
The European Regulator Forum at its last session in Cyprus discussed a common regulatory approach with FCC Chmn. Powell. EU regulators “only agreed that we have to agree, but we did not know on what we had to agree,” Colasanti said.
In his opinion VoIP providers should choose the category under which they should be regulated -- vs. the Finnish model in which the regulator chooses. VoIP providers should have access to geographical numbers and not be confined in “reserved ghettos” of special number blocks, he said. While emergency services certainly are “one of greatest concerns,” Colasanti said the most important thing at the outset was “letting users know what they are buying.”
“We should try to get well-informed consumers who can chose from the different services,” agreed David Currie, chmn. of the British Ofcom. Currie said VoIP regulators could meet many existing regulatory provisions, designed for classical telephony, but in general they may not fit well with existing telephony regulation. It was important, said Currie, “that we don’t impose undue requirements on fledgling services.” Ofcom has decided to give operators the choice to deliver emergency services without subjecting them to regulations applying to traditional telephone service providers. Ofcom allows number portability and geographic numbers to VoIP providers. That has prompted German VoIP providers Duesseldorf Indigo Networks to enter the British VoIP market with its “sipgate” service.
Sipgate customers can call one another free in Germany and Austria, and it also partners with FreeWorldDialup and Sipphone for free calls. “Instead of millions of Euro fees for the allocation of geographic numbers, Ofcom promotes competition,” said Tim Mois, CEO of Indigo Networks. As German RegTP ordered a stop to allocation of German geographic numbers to customers not living in the cities they correspond to, Mois said VoIP providers in Germany had to change their business models. Indigo started “nufone” last Fri., offering the first flat-rate voice in Germany for 19.95 Euro monthly and plans to partner with another company in order to apply for some 100 (out of 5200) German area code blocks. Sipgate competitor web. de decided to draw out of local numbers and use a special numbering block 01212 for its FreePhone customers. Geographic numbering with its administrative overhead was undercutting VoIP as a cheap communication means, said Web.de board member and Freenet CEO Eckhard Spoerr.
While RegTP Pres. Matthias Kurth announced the opening of the planned 032 special VoIP numbering range, Spoerr warned: “We still don’t know when interconnection rules for these numbers will be finalized and so far it already took RegTP one year’s time.” As long as conditions for VoIP providers are inadequate, he said, he sees no sense in investing in emergency call functionalities. As DSL access of incumbent Deutsche Telekom is still bundled with the normal phone line -- other than in Norway where there is “naked DSL” -- customers can’t substitute VoIP for their normal phone line. “Why should we provide emergency call functionality as long as the customer is forced to hold on to the classical phone line, which has emergency call routing?” asked Spoerr.
Unbundling of DSL and the traditional phone line, according to Kurth and Andersen, will be the hottest issue in the coming month. Both warned that total unbundling could lead to problems for infrastructure providers and therefore to lack of infrastructure investment.