With consumers increasingly demanding advanced services – that are available anytime, anywhere – operators are moving towards the NGAs, offering multiple converged services – such as IPTV, video-on demand, audio, voice and Internet access – based on very high speed IP access.

NGAs present complicated challenges for regulators. Different regulatory authorities have so far responded in different ways, depending in part on the environment in which they operate, and in part on the nature of the NGN migration envisioned by major market players. Therefore the challenges in different markets will not be the same. 

However common ground does exist in the promotion of competition. Tom Lindström, director, Government and Industry Relations at Ericsson says: “National regulators want to promote competition in end-user services by stimulating more service providers to venture into the market. Competition goes hand-in-hand with service availability and broader benefits for the users.”

Lindström admits that the NGA environment contains some potential economic bottlenecks  leading to operators shying away from major investments in NGN infrastructure. This could be because of concern over high costs and uncertainties in demand and regulatory conditions that new environments would bring. “The goal of promoting competition also means that regulators strive to ensure that new competitors have access to the dominant operators’ network at different levels. Which means a risk that regulators take away some of the justification of the investing operator’s business case”.

Some examples of challenges and bottlenecks in the deployment of NGNs include the costs to access public infrastructure, the location and size of equipment street cabinets, and the interfaces to the services and applications layers – all elements that regulators are trying to find a solution to.

“Ericsson supports competition between active infrastructures as the best way forward to ensure sustainable competition, investment and service innovation” Lindström says.

He adds that operators can prepare for these regulatory challenges by having clear business case alternatives. “We see that the incumbent telco players are generally positioning themselves as integrated full service providers,” he says.

“As NGN technologies and services begin to replace conventional copper-based telecommunications infrastructure, regulatory policies and processes must be reviewed and adapted. Failure to adopt appropriate regulatory measures may lead to delayed network investments in NGAs and a delay in benefits to businesses, consumers and societies from the emerging new services market.

“Maximizing investment incentives for all players while creating opportunities for market entry by new service and network providers is going to be key. Global standards should be the basis for all the regulatory measures that result from this new environment.”