Brussels, 06.06.2018: Today ECTA celebrates its 20^th anniversary of promoting competition for the greater good of society.

ECTA recalls that effective competition is the key of current and future success of the Gigabit Society and the European Union has achieved a lot in the past 20 years through liberalisation. Pro-competitive access regulation has been and remains instrumental.

Brussels, 31 May 2018: Ahead of the 8 June TTE Council, we urge Member States to remain cautious in their examination of the draft ePrivacy Regulation (ePR). Limited progress has been achieved since the beginning of Council discussions early last year and many questions remain open. More time is needed to assess the ePR’s scope of application, its overlaps with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its impact on all sectors of the economy.

Brussels, 14 May 2018

Dear negotiator,

The end of competition in EU electronic communications will cripple the Connected Digital Single Market

After more than 19 months of interinstitutional exchange, ECTA is today writing to you to share its concern that the EU's vision for a Connected Digital Single Market risks being stopped dead in its tracks before it can effectively take off.

The reason: connectivity, the key ingredient powering all aspects of the Digital Single Market, is about to lose its competitive foundation in the negotiations on a proposed European Electronic Communications Code – the negotiations in which you participate.

Brussels, 14.05.2018: ECTA today addresses an open letter to the co-legislators and to the European Commission to warn that closing the negotiations on the draft European Electronic Communications Code ('the Code') may turn an apparent legislative victory into a very real and lasting policy defeat, if negotiators settle for trading off competition against investment, as currently proposed.

Brussels, 20 April 2018: Transatel, the leading European Mobile Virtual Network Enabler and Aggregator with strong expertise in Machine-to-Machine connectivity and in the Internet of Things joins ECTA as a Full member.

Jacques Bonifay, Transatel CEO: “In the past few years, Transatel has known an important deployment of its activities, with a variety of subjects ranging from enabling MVNOs to enabling the Internet of Things, along with some ambitious projects in global machine-to-machine. The scope has also greatly evolved: from specifically European, we’re now launching projects in Japan, the US, and the whole of Europe. Such an important change of scale indicated the need to become a member of ECTA.”

Brussels, 12 March 2018: Last week, the European Commission issued a draft compromise proposal text on article 74 of the European Electronic Communications Code, which is being currently negotiated between the Council and the European Parliament.

This article aims at setting down the rules for co-investment schemes between the telecom operator having significant market power (SMP) and other operators.

On several occasions, ECTA has previously flagged the potentially anti-competitive effects of this article.

The text now proposed by the European Commission in response to the Council’s inappropriate deregulation proposal exceeds our worst nightmares: Not only does the draft extend deregulation well beyond co-investment by including simple commercial offers, but its aim seems to be to establish an overall passport for regulatory holidays that will irrecoverably damage competition and hence investment.

With the proposal for a European Electronic Communications Code, the European Commission has expressed its ambition to rewrite EU regulation to enable the arrival of the Gigabit Society in Europe. This ambition covers both fixed and mobile networks and ties in with a strategic action plan for advancing 5G, the next generation of wireless technology in the EU.

Brussels, 29 January  2018:  AOTA (Association des Opérateurs Télécoms Alternatifs ) a French association  representing  commercial regional B2C and B2B internet service providers and operators became member of ECTA. 

"We are happy to join ECTA because we represent nearly 40 regional ISPs spread throughout France," says David Marciano, President of AOTA. "Our members are very active participants to digital development policies in our territories and it is important that our voice is heard also in the European digital market".

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Brussels, 23 October 2017. Ahead of negotiations on rules to promote investment and thereby boost broadband connectivity in the EU, the Council deals a blow to regulatory independence in pursuit of better investment conditions. ECTA calls on the European Parliament and the European Commission to ensure that wilful political intervention in the work of national regulatory authorities (NRAs) be excluded under the future framework for electronic communications.