European vice president and Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes appears at FTTH Council Europe in Milan and makes it abundantly clear that incumbent Telco’s and their national regulators should stop fiddling whilst Europe is drifting towards the digital waste-pipe.

A packed plenary – probably more than a 1000 delegates – listened intently as European vice-president Neelie Kroes, read the Riot Act to non-compliant national regulators but then, well aware of incumbent interests sitting in the front row, qualified her remarks by saying, “This is not a warning but a request for deeper cooperation”.

To the obvious delight of FTTH advocates gathered here at their annual conference, Neelie Kroes had opened her remarks by observing that the Digital Agenda was central to Europe’s economic future and it would not be possible “to maximize access while failing on fibre”.

The delegates would, one hour later, hear that the FTTH Council’s annual report showed that in the global context Europe was very much in the slow lane, but for this speech Neelie Kroes simply observed that “the current rate of new connections – now down to 25,000 a day – is simply not good enough”.

“To intensify efforts and get higher investments on the ground,” our Digital Agenda Commissioner observed that that regulatory clarity (and specifically the NGA Recommendation) was key to ensuring infrastructure investments that would “lift Europe’s overall competitiveness”.

Appealing for National Regulators and incumbent Telco’s to “play by the rules’ Neelie Kroes expressed disappointment in seeing that “some NRAs have departed significantly from important provisions of the Recommendation”.

Promoting a competitive Single Market the Digital Agenda Commissioner now has a new tool – “the power to open a second phase investigation on the appropriate and consistent applications of remedies”, which, translating from Euro-speak, sounded far from an idle threat.   But no, it was but a “request for deeper cooperation”. Europe, she said, “does not need 27 approaches to NGA challenges”.

With a final clarion call for regulators and operators to recognize that they need each other, Neelie Kroes swept out of the hall ceding the platform to a speaker from ETNO – stranded with no time left to adjust his prepared advocacy of incumbent reasons for delays and defences against the tide of innovation.

And then, as if that was not incumbent discomfort enough, the following speaker from the European Competitive Telecoms Association made the FTTH position absolutely clear. “We believe that some dominant firms have in practice been able to make extra profits over many years without any commitment to invest in their networks. Governments, regulators and consumers should be asking what happened to that money and why it was not already used to build fibre networks.

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This report (from FTTH Council Europe 2011 annual conference in Milan) was written for members of the UK's Communications Management Association.

The full text of Commissioner Kroes speech can be found here

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