EU Parliament overwhelmingly approves key telecoms regulation: price reductions down the road

The European Parliament approved on Tuesday (23 April) the EU’s broadband act, the Gigabit Infrastructure Act (GIA), which aims to accelerate the deployment of high-capacity networks and reduce prices for consumers.

EU lawmakers approved the GIA during this week’s European Parliament Strasbourg plenary session, by 594 votes in favour to 7 votes against.

The new act is the biggest telecoms file for the 2019-2024 mandate, after the idea of a “Telecom Act,” coined as “Digital Networks Act” by single market Commissioner Thierry Breton, was postponed to the next mandate and the senders-pay initiative did not materialise.

During the legal-linguistic verification process by the Parliament and Council services, the deadline for the text’s entry into force was changed from 20 days to three days after publication in the official journal of the EU.

This amendment has been added to avoid a legislative void. The intra-EU communication price cap, set until 14 May, could have expired, as the formal adoption of the text by the Council of the EU will happen on 29 April, during an Agriculture and Fisheries Council.

“The GIA is a game changer […] it makes the deployment of ultra-speed internet networks much cheaper, easier and faster,” Romanian Renew Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Alin Mituța, and rapporteur of the text, told Euractiv.

More harmonisation

The GIA revises the 2014 Broadband Cost Reduction Directive and aims to support the achievement of EU’s telecom Digital decade targets. These ambitious goals include connecting 100% of EU citizens to very high-capacity networks, meaning high-speed fiber-optic internet and 5G by 2030.

To do so, the GIA rules aim at pushing national authorities to accelerate the granting of permits and rights of way, when telecom operators wish to deploy new infrastructure.

Some of the GIA’s novelty and power lies in the change in the type of legislation — from a directive into a regulation, harmonising national administrative and permit-granting procedures more than the previous directive.

Yet the text unifies these procedures across the bloc to a minimum, similar to the compromise text.

A majority of EU countries inside the Council of the EU, pressured the European Parliament for this “minimum harmonisation” rule, arguing that some procedures ran contrary to their national property laws.

As a result, a complex mechanism has been set up for the harmonisation of permit-granting and rights-of-way, giving the possibility for member states to adapt the new EU-wide rules to their national context.

Price reduction

The GIA sets a detailed agenda to reduce prices paid by consumers within the EU by 2029.

The roaming regulation abolished extra fees on text messages (SMS), calls, and internet browsing in the EU when consumers travel abroad in 2017. But surcharges still exist when sending an SMS (€0.06/text) or call (€0.19/minute) from their home country to another country in the EU.

The GIA aims to abolish these fees by 2029. Furthermore, telecom operators will be allowed to reduce their retail prices by 2025.

These fees are regulated in the EU and expire on 14 May. To avoid any legislative void, that would allow operators to increase or decrease their prices, the entry into force of the GIA has been changed to three days instead of 20 after publication of the text in the official journal of the EU.

“By ending the extra fees for intra-EU calls we essentially created a Schengen for EU communications,” concluded Mituța.

[Edited by Rajnish Singh]

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