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"Today's vote is good news for European consumers," said Viviane Reding, the EU Telecoms Commissioner. "The European Parliament has today voted in favour of a strong and competitive Single Telecoms Market without borders for cross-border services, competition and investment in Europe. This will level the playing field for telecoms operators in Europe, enhance legal certainty, and broaden consumer choice."

the European Parliament today voted in favour of establishing a European telecoms regulator.

new body will be financed from the EU budget in order to strengthen its independence and to ensure equality among national regulators.

The deployment of NGA is indispensable to deliver new broadband services to European consumers. While a number of operators, both incumbents and alternative operators, have launched large-scale rollouts of new broadband infrastructure in a number of Member States, Europe appears to be still lagging behind other economies, notably the United States and Japan.

The basic principle of the Commission's draft Recommendation is that national regulatory authorities should provide access to the networks of dominant operators at the lowest possible level. In particular, they should mandate access to the ducts of the dominant operators allowing competitors to roll out their own fibre. However NRAs should also impose further physical access obligations (access to unlit fibre) beyond access to ducts where ducts are not available or the population density is too low for a sustainable business model. Access to active elements such as "bitstream" shall be maintained provided lower level remedies do not sufficiently address distortions of competition.

Worldwide Broadband Subscribers Top 382.4m - Growth Slows

Point Topic has released its latest 'World Broadband Statistics Report' for the second quarter of 2008, highlighting a worldwide growth in broadband subscribers of 3.92% (14.44m net additions) between Q1 and Q2 2008. This increase represents a continued slowdown of broadband growth and is the lowest reported number of net additions since Q3 2005.

(nominally 3.6Mbit/s, but more realistically 1Mbit/s)

Last week, the French Parliament and the French regulatory authority ARCEP took major steps in defining a regulatory framework that aims at achieving widespread deployment of Fibre to the Home (FttH).

disagreements about conditions for such fibre access are subject to ARCEP's dispute-resolution powers under the existing Art. L. 36-8 and enhances the existing Art. L. 36-6 in a manner which enables ARCEP to make an ex-ante determination of the technical and financial conditions of the new symmetric fibre access obligation.