Telecom regulatory regimes vary greatly across Europe, though all...

surveyed the effectiveness of national telecom regulatory schemes in 10 of the original 15 member states at 2003’s end, also found widely differing levels of total investment by both incumbent telcos and new entrants, and a strong correlation between investment levels and regulatory effectiveness. Of the states studied -- the U.K., Ireland, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Belgium and Germany -- the U.K. came out on top, while Germany was last. The assessments were based on 66 criteria divided into 5 areas: (1) General powers of a country’s national regulatory authority (NRA), including the speed of its process, transparency of its activities and degree of independence. (2) The effectiveness of a country’s dispute settlement body, including the speed with which it exercises its powers, its respect for due process, and the effectiveness of its sanctions. (3) The application of access rules allowing new entrants to tie into the networks of significant market power operators. (4) The existence and availability of key access products such as fixed voice interconnection, wholesale leased lines, fixed-to-mobile interconnection services, local loop unbundling (LLU), and wholesale DSL services. (5) Whether a country has fully and effectively implemented the EU’s new regulatory framework. The U.K. scored high in most areas, but was weak in LLU and in the speed of its Office of Communications’s (OFCOM’s) dispute settlement process. Germany ranked strongly in the use of due process in its dispute settlement program and in the availability of rights of way over public land for access but was weak in nearly all other categories. The ECTA report also analyzed the relationship between the scorecard results and investment numbers from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development, finding that as much as 90% of the variation among countries in investment levels can be explained by the quality of regulatory environment. Telecom spending per capita ranges from $236 in the U.K. to $86 in Germany, ECTA said. The report covers only 10 states because they were the ones for which new telecom entrants provided data by the cutoff date, said ECTA Regulatory Affairs Dir. Andy Tarrant. Tarrant said he hopes next year’s scorecard will cover all 15 original members as well as most of the 10 new states. It’s likely “it will only be with the 2nd report that all new entrants in the new member states will buy into the idea,” Tarrant said. However, he said, next year’s report will, at a minimum, cover the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. OFCOM didn’t comment by our deadline. A spokesman for the German NRA, the Regulatory Authority for Telecom & Post (Reg TP), said he couldn’t discuss Reg TP’s reaction to the scorecard because “we have not had the opportunity to study the report in detail yet.”