Commission acts against five Member States for non-compliance with unbundling regulations
The European Commission is taking further action on unbundling infringement proceedings against five Member States. The action comes on account of failure to ensure that the reference offer from incumbent operators is complete and sufficient detailed, as laid out in the 'Regulation on unbundling of the local loop'. The five Member States facing infringement proceedings are Germany, France, Ireland, the Netherlands and Portugal. The reference offer from incumbent operators should be sufficiently unbundled to allow competitors to pay solely for what they require, and must provide a breakdown of costs for the sub-loop so that an operator can install equipment closer to the customers' premises than the local exchange. 'Regulators and operators have had time to implement the requirements of the EU regulation, and there can be no more delays in opening up the local access market to competition. The action we have already taken has had immediate results, and I hope that national authorities can move quickly to overcome the problems that we are addressing in this latest decision on unbundling,' said EU Enterprise and Information society Commissioner, Erkki Liikanen. These proceedings follow action taken against Germany, Portugal and Greece in December 2001, concerning shared access to the local loop. Portugal and Greece have since remedied this particular problem and the Commission is now closing these cases. Germany has also recently reported positive steps to remedy the situation, and the Commission is now also considering closing this case. The regulation on the unbundling of the local loop was adopted in December 2000, and is designed to bring more competition to the provision of local broadband access while providing high speed Internet access. In a November 2001 implementation report, the Commission noted that progress had been disappointing, and four weeks later opened the first round of infringement proceedings in order to ensure that progress was made more rapidly.