The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communication (BEREC) adamantly...
The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communication (BEREC) adamantly opposes policies proposed by the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) for the future International Telecommunication Regulations, it said. For the World Conference on International Telecommunications in December in Dubai,…
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ETNO proposed a “sender party network pays” accounting regime and an “end-to-end quality of services” principle. But BEREC warned against what it said was an antagonistic “interconnection philosophy” which was based on “connection-oriented circuit switched old generation PSTN [public switched telephone network] and voices services” clearly “at odds with the principles of connection-less packet switched networks underlying the success of the Internet to date. … It is in all our interests to protect the continued development of the open, dynamic and global platform that the Internet provides, which has evolved over time (without regulatory intervention), and helped enable so much innovation at the network endpoints. ETNO’s proposal could undermine this and therefore lead to an overall loss of welfare.” It said users would not be willing to pay for premium services if the best-effort offer is working well enough, and end-to-end service level agreements are costly and neither commercially nor technically realistic. BEREC said ETNO is just “trying to extract additional revenues from its existing network assets, in a bid to reassert control over a changing communications ecosystem."