Next Generation Access in Europe

European regulators are struggling to find the right balance between promoting the competitive impact of local loop unbundling (LLU) and encouraging investment in next generation access networks by incumbents and others

In continental Europe, regulators have tended to focus on the provision by incumbents to competing providers of access to physical infrastructure. This affords competing providers a high degree of product differentiation, but tends to be relatively uneconomic, to the detriment of unbundlers in markets where the cable operator is strong

In the UK, the regulator has tended to focus on the provision by BT Openreach of bitstream access at a price set by the market