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ANCOM, Competition Council and ANRE Explore Means for Cross-sectoral Collaboration

20.04.2017
 
 
The regulatory authority for communications – ANCOM, the Competition Council and the regulatory authority in the energy field – ANRE held a first joint meeting dedicated to the providers active in the energy and communications sectors in order to debate the pro-competitive practices and regulations in the area of physical infrastructures. The meeting was also attended by the decision-making factors in the field of establishing the public policies, representatives of the relevant associations and owners of infrastructures and networks.   
Competition and sectoral regulation
The debate was held in the context in which the competition and sectoral regulatory authorities are working on fulfilling their specific tasks: ANCOM, on implementing Law no.159/2016 on the regime of physical infrastructures for electronic communications, respectively ANRE, on creating the framework for speeding up the development of smart networks. Furthermore, the Competition Council is closely watching the evolutions in the cross-sectoral cooperation in order to ensure a sustainable and healthy competition to the interest of the Romanian consumers.   
The two sectors, communications and energy, though featuring different specificities as regards the functioning of networks and the way in which the production is achieved and the services are made available, have a common point as regards the physical infrastructures which they share or develop together.
Cross-sectoral cooperation
The interest for cross-sectoral cooperation is mutual and evolving amid technological advances towards increasingly performing and agile networks, capable of delivering value-for-money services. Moreover, the interest is even greater as concepts such as smart cities, which provide and benefit from public services byharnessing universal connectivity and digital ecosystems, Internet of Things (IoT) or smart grids are becoming ubiquitous.
By means of the relevant associations and of the providers that attended the meeting, both the communications industry and the energy industry emphasized to the regulatory side that they need a predictable, less bureaucratic and stable regulatory framework to run their business, investment and innovation plans.
The event, aimed at facilitating a structured dialogue between the regulatory authorities, and between these and the industry, also showed that a cross-sectoral regulatory cooperation is required in response to the natural evolutions of the infrastructures from Romania with a view to improve the outcomes of the regulations, reduce the costs and incentivise the efficient investments in infrastructure. The participants in the dialogue agreed on the fact that the competition and the regulatory authorities can deliver better results as long as there is a good collaboration, using the levels of competition or the regulations, as applicable, to make market forces work better.
The Romanian Regulatory Network
To explore and exploit the collaboration potential in order to promote better regulation, ANCOM, ANRE and the Competition Council announced their intention to set up the ”Romanian Regulatory Network”, a formal cooperation framework for the three public entities aiming at providing high quality regulatory services to the energy and communications markets and, implicitly, to the providers and their users.