The European Commission will today publish draft guidelines to help national watchdogs define which markets within the recently liberalised telecoms sector need further regulation.
The guidelines will be discussed with the industry and regulators and will be subject to substantial changes before they are finalised around September 2002.
Issues that will be addressed by the guidelines, such as price caps on fixed and mobile calls, are likely to have a significant impact on operators here such as Eircom, Vodafone and O2.
"The Commission will publish the draft tomorrow, and this will trigger a one-month consultation period," a source told Reuters yesterday ahead of a council of telecommunications ministers in Luxembourg.
The European Union started to liberalise its telecoms market in 1998 and is taking steps to fully open the sector. In draft guidelines obtained by Reuters earlier this year, the EU executive recommended the reduction of some burdensome obligations on operators as competition heats up.
Advocates of more regulation believe that dominant operators should have obligations, such as price limits, imposed on them to prevent them from taking advantage of their status.
Others believe action should be taken only when an operator applies existing competition laws in an abusive way.
European Commissioner Mr Erkki Liikanen, in charge of the telecoms dossier, has repeatedly said new obligations should not be imposed on emerging telecoms markets, such as those linked to the internet and e-commerce.
The draft list is likely to include the markets for call termination to fixed and mobile telecoms networks, which is the price levied by a phone operator on a competitor to call its network. Such charges account for the bulk of the retail cost of a mobile phone call, but customers are rarely aware of them.
Other markets on the draft list are the connections between local phone exchanges and customers' homes and businesses, known as the "local loop", interconnection of leased lines and the national markets for international roaming on mobile networks.
The list will be reviewed in March 2003, the source said.
