Bevil Wood­ing

"We need busi­ness mod­els based not on yes­ter­day's rip-offs, but on to­mor­row's dig­i­tal op­por­tu­ni­ties: with rev­enues not from out­ra­geous mar­gins on roam­ing, but from new in­no­v­a­tive ser­vices that peo­ple will want to pay for."

Neel­ie Kroes,

vice pres­i­dent of theEu­ro­pean Com­mis­sion

Caribbean tele­coms reg­u­la­tors and op­er­a­tors should be close­ly track­ing the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions re­form de­bate in progress in Eu­rope. Their Eu­ro­pean coun­ter­parts are grap­pling with pres­sures to en­sure that reg­u­la­to­ry prac­tice fa­cil­i­tates eco­nom­ic growth, in­creas­es com­pet­i­tive­ness and pro­tects the in­ter­ests of con­sumers.

These are the iden­ti­cal is­sues be­ing faced by re­gion­al reg­u­la­tors in a rapid­ly mu­tat­ing Caribbean reg­u­la­to­ry en­vi­ron­ment. A look at the ap­proach be­ing tak­ing in the Eu­ro­pean Union (EU) can pro­vide the im­pe­tus not just for lo­cal reg­u­la­to­ry re­form, but for much need­ed re­gion­al ap­proach to reg­u­la­tion in the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions sec­tor.

Na­tion­al tele­com reg­u­la­tors of­ten work with lim­it­ed re­sources and an even more lim­it­ed sight of the re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al ma­neu­ver­ing of the op­er­a­tors they are sup­posed to reg­u­late. It is no won­der then that they strug­gle at times to pro­vide the need­ed guid­ance, in­put and pres­sure need­ed to en­sure that op­ti­mise the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions re­source.

Last Sep­tem­ber, the Eu­ro­pean Com­mis­sion (EC) re­leased a list of pro­posed changes to the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions reg­u­la­tions aimed at cre­at­ing a sin­gle mar­ket for telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions across the EU. Key pro­pos­als in­clud­ed re­duc­ing roam­ing charges to con­sumers, in­tro­duc­ing an EU wide pro­tec­tion of net neu­tral­i­ty and har­mon­is­ing rules ap­plic­a­ble to tele­com op­er­a­tors.

Along­side the leg­isla­tive changes, the EC al­so pub­lished a rec­om­men­da­tion to har­monise costs that in­cum­bent op­er­a­tors can charge oth­er op­er­a­tors for the ac­cess to their cop­per net­works. The mea­sure is in­tend­ed to pro­vide cer­tain­ty to in­vestors with the aim of fos­ter­ing the de­vel­op­ment of next gen­er­a­tion broad­band ser­vices.

Many of the changes pro­posed by the EC are al­so hot top­ics in the Caribbean. The Caribbean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union (CTU), re­cent­ly host­ed a re­gion­al min­is­te­r­i­al fo­rum where it ad­vo­cat­ed the an up­dat­ed ap­proach to tele­com reg­u­la­tion.

Tele­com reg­u­la­tors in the re­gion have of­ten been jus­ti­fi­ably crit­i­cised for be­ing too slow to re­spond to the re­al­i­ties of the mod­ern en­vi­ron­ment. The emer­gence of In­ter­net-en­abled ser­vices such as voice-over-IP tech­nolo­gies, and the dy­nam­ics of the dig­i­tal econ­o­my are a far cry from the de-mo­nop­o­li­sa­tion fo­cus that char­ac­terised the re­gion's ap­proach to reg­u­la­tion for over two decades. Dif­fer­ent times call for a dif­fer­ent tac­tics. What is need now is a tru­ly re­gion­al ap­proach to tele­coms reg­u­la­tion the puts de­vel­op­ment, not re­stric­tion, as the defin­ing pri­or­i­ty.

Re­gion­al reg­u­la­to­ry prac­tice must now be honed to bet­ter stim­u­late eco­nom­ic growth op­por­tu­ni­ties across all sec­tors, and to bet­ter safe­guard the in­ter­est of con­sumers. This is why the de­bate over the Eu­ro­pean re­forms is so rel­e­vant to the re­gion­al di­a­log be­tween our own reg­u­la­tors and op­er­a­tors.