The number of loops unbundled by the new operators has been growing sharply. At the end of September there were 43,127 unbundled loops, 55% more than three months beforehand and seven times more than the figure for the year-on-year period, when there were only 6,515 unbundled loops in Portugal. The sharp growth in the pace of unbundled loops is largely due to the regulatory changes carried out by ANACOM in the last few months.
There are currently registered requests to unbundle 4,250 more loops, whereby the figure for the end of September will soon be surpassed. This will continue the high growth in total unbundled loops - the copper-wire pair running from the Portugal Telecom exchange to customers' homes - and enable new operators to reach end customers directly, without needing to provide service via PT. The number of operators investing in infrastructure via local loop unbundling is also on the rise, with four operators now interested in this business model.
The high pace of loop unbundling results from the regulatory measures adopted by ANACOM, which enabled a 60% drop in the installation price and an 18.7% drop in the monthly fee for local loop, besides leading to shorter availability time limits. 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 vis-à-vis 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 chosen by the final user, without prior verification of the validity of the customers' authorisations or requests, as had occurred to date.
This set of measures aims to improve competition in the sector, as it enables the new operators to overcome existing restraints on access, and has even led to the appearance of very aggressive voice and broadband offers, based on the wholesale LLU offer.
These modifications to the Reference Unbundling Offer, along with others such as PT's obligation to offer the new operators more network access points, the price cuts in the ''PT ADSL Network'' wholesale offer, the introduction of new debit classes and the changed procedures meaning to facilitate customer migration between operators, obliging PT to start the process as soon as it receives the provision request from the operator chosen by the customer, are together a set of conditions that facilitate the new operators' activity and foster broadband penetration in Portugal.
