Total Pageviews

Thursday, March 19, 2009

More on mobile termination rates

On another blog, I've been reporting on the special pleading of mobiles, and the incompetent regulation of their termination rates, to the detriment of consumers with fixed line connections. 

The number 100billion€ keeps coming up - first its the minimm number in what ECTA claims has been the effect of these distorted rates over the past decade; second its what the mobiles lost on the 3G auction (the total cost in Europe was substantially higher but the spectrum was never going to be given away); third, it would make an enormous hole in the cost of getting every European household onto at least 50Mbps broadband lines - even if the backhaul would still be a bottleneck.  Should thes 3 numbers be related? The regulatory purists would say no, the realists would say of course they are!

The European broadbnd environment has been so enormously distorted by these problems for the past decade, and arguably its one reason why competitive broadband has been pachy at best.

2 comments:

Pragmatist said...

Chris

Orange and T-Mobile are cited in the Economist as saying Net Neutrality can't be allowed in the mobile broadband space, otherwise (it's implied) the operators won't make money. They say file-sharing traffic, for example, should give way to the rest, but there's no discussion of what else this might mean. Thoughts?

Best
SDJ

chris said...

First, do no evil! If they intend to traffic shape, they have to inform consumers fully. If they intend to block P2P (inc. Skype) I would think that is an abuse of their monopolies on termination and should be ruled out by Ofcom.