National regulators will be given greater authority to oversee plans proposed by operators in order to address problems such as excessive dominance by incumbents.
The new law that will be implemented May 25 2011 will require all national telecoms regulators to notify the Commission, BEREC (the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications) and telecoms regulators in other EU countries, of any plans they have for the resolving of local issues.
The Commission said that these measures are designed to make it easier to apply solutions across the EU as a single market. At the same time, it claims the plans will give regulatory bodies more independence by disallowing political interference in their daily duties.
The rules will also allow regulators to make dominant telcos undergo functional separation to ensure competition. This enables the regulators to separate a company’s access network from its service operations without undergoing ownership separation or creating a new company.
