Press Releases

15 years of independent regulation of the Romanian communications market

04.10.2017
 
 
The National Authority for Management and Regulation in Communications of Romania (ANCOM) organized a new edition of its international conference entitled "Regulation 360⁰ - from word to terabyte, in 15 years" to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the country’s electronic communications market regulator.
On this occasion, ANCOM’s president, Adrian Dița, offered a retrospective view on the effects of the Authority's regulations on the Romanian market, which has today become one of Europe’s most competitive markets.
"Concerning the Internet, we are now speaking in terms of millions of connections, whereas - 15 years ago - these services were almost inexistent in the Authority's statistics. The exponential growth of the Internet in Romania is also due to the low tariffs on our market, which are half of the EU average for the fixed Internet, for example - 12.6 euros compared to 25.9 euros for subscriptions from 30 to 100 Mbps", declared Adrian Dița, President of ANCOM, in the opening of the conference.
Mobile and fixed telephony retail tariffs saw the same downward trend, especially as a result of ANCOM's wholesale market regulation, which determined a decrease by 90% in maximum interconnection rates for mobile termination services - from 9.72 eurocents in 2003 to 0.96 eurocents -, respectively on average by 80% for fixed termination services, reaching 0.14 eurocents/minute, starting April 1, 2014.
To show how the Authority’s measures impacted mobile telephony tariffs, ANCOM has developed an application where a user can introduce data on his/her current level of mobile telephony services consumption and see what the cost of such services could have been 15 years ago.
A retrospective of the 15 years since the liberalization of the Romanian electronic communications market, available herein Romanian, also shows that the market value has doubled, from 7.38 billion lei in 2003 to 14.96 billion lei in 2016, despite the economic up- and downturns on the national and global levels.
Moreover, the document reveals that the number of users and connections is on an upward trend, in almost all segments - with over 27 million access connections to fixed and mobile telephony services reported in Romania in 2016, 137% more than the 11.4 million recorded in 2003 (the increase was due to mobile telephony).
Fixed and mobile Internet witnessed significant growth in terms of both connections and structure, as well as in terms of traffic. Thus, the number of fixed broadband Internet access connections increased from 14 thousand, as reported at the end of 2003, to 4.4 million at the end of 2016, while the number of broadband mobile connections increased to 16.6 million at the end of 2016, from 181 thousand at the end of 2003.
Internet consumption in Romania relies mostly on fixed connections, although they are far fewer than mobile connections. Thus, the total traffic achieved in 2016 through the fixed networks was 5.4 million TB, while mobile networks recorded a traffic of 169 thousand TB.
The document "15 years of telecom regulation in Romania" is available, in Romanian, here, along with an Infographic on the evolution of the main telecoms indicators.
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