Concern is growing that funding for investments in communications infrastructure...
Concern is growing that funding for investments in communications infrastructure may stop being a priority for EU governments and institutions, the European Competitive Telecommunications Association said Thursday. Last year, the European Commission proposed setting aside 9 billion euros ($11.6 billion)…
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for a Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) to support investments in open e-communications networks, it said. But potential budget cuts may hit the very funds that could contribute the most to Europe’s future growth, it said. As talks between member countries and EU institutions on the CEF rev up, ECTA Chairman Tom Ruhan urged officials to realize that “if we need to spend less, we need to look at where the money was spent in the past: we cannot cut investments in our future or we will just repeat our mistakes.” The CEF guarantees that public money is spent on high-speed broadband networks that are future-proof and open and that will ensure competition by alternative operators via wholesale access, ECTA said. Without clear and nondiscriminatory open-access rules, taxpayers’ funding will mostly benefit dominant players, it said.