Copenhagen Economics was commissioned by the Swedish Competition Authority to analyse the regulation of the European broadband markets. We studied how the access to the broadband markets is regulated and what methods the national regulatory authorities use to regulate the markets.

Our study shows that the Swedish Regulatory Authority has been one of the front runners in implementing the EU framework. But the time for implementations varies a lot between the different countries.

Most national regulation authorities have defined the relevant markets in the same way as the EU Commission. The Commission has accepted other market definitions made by national regulation authorities. This indicates that the Commission focuses more on methodology used that than on the actual market definition.

With one exception, all countries have identified a provider with significant market power. The exception is low quality broadband in the Netherlands.

The countries use hard remedies to regulate broadband access, normal access and price regulation.

The direct effect of hard regulation is that it makes it less attractive to build own infrastructure and instead promotes service competition. It appears that the regulatory authorities only give incentives to go from bitstream access to local loop unbundling and not from local loop unbundling to own infrastructure.

The main conclusions of the study can be found in Chapter 12 of the report “Konkurrensen i Sverige 2006”

For further information about the report or about telecommucation economics, please contact Henrik Ballebye Olesen