The national telecommunications market was very dynamic in 2005, above all in broadband. A clear example of this is the high number of local loops that were unbundled that year, showing the strong investment of operators alternative to Portugal Telecom in providing offers with a more direct access to the final client, more flexible in the definition of retail offers.
By the end of December, the unbundled loops mounted to 72,019, a 720% increase regarding last year’s 8,780 unbundled loops. Regarding the previous quarter, there is a 67% growth, since there were 43,127 unbundled loops in September. During the year’s last quarter, alternative operators unbundled 28,892 loops.
Accompanying the raise in unbundled loops there is also an increase in the number of operators aiming at directly reaching final clients. In fact, at the end of December there were six operators with local loop unbundling already, compared with four at the end of September.
The number of co-installed operators’ switchboards rose from 152 in September to 184 at the end of the year.
These data, which result from a set of improvements to regulatory conditions made by the regulator in 2005, still do not show the price reductions that ANACOM determined for 2006 (10% reduction in the local loop’s monthly fee for the complete access mode and 24% for the shared access mode). It is thus foreseen that this competition trend will this year increase, easing and fostering the expansion of broadband. In 2005 already, the improvement of regulatory conditions reduced constraints at the access level and led to aggressive voice and broadband offers based on the LLU wholesale offer.
It should be noted that ANACOM has reduced over the latest months the local loop’s installation and monthly fees and also determined the shortening of the loop provision deadlines.
The regulator also determined an increase in the value of the compensations that PT Comunicações has to pay to the new operators for non-compliance with loop provision, and also introduced procedures that simplify and streamline the process: PT Comunicações must begin the process of supplying local loop at the moment it receives the order from the operator that was chosen by the final user, without prior verification of the validity of the customers’ authorisations or requests, as had occurred to date. Lastly, a new statistical data collection system was also defined for better market monitoring.
These changes to the Reference Unbundling Offer, along with others such as PT’s obligation to offer more network access points to the new operators, price cuts in the “PT ADSL Network” wholesale offer, the definition of new speed classes and the change of procedures aiming to facilitate customer migration between operators, are together a set of conditions that facilitate competition and foster broadband penetration in Portugal.
