European interest in the Panel
03 April 2009
There is growing interest around Europe in the experience of the Communications Consumer Panel here in the UK. The Panel Manager Alistair Bridge recently spoke about the Panel at a training event run by the Hungarian telecommunications regulator. Last week I was invited over to Lisbon to speak about our work to ANACOM, the Portguese regulator for telecommunications and posts.
The event was chaired by ANACOM's Chairman Professor Jose Amado da Silva and attended by ANACOM staff and stakeholders. I took the best part of an hour to deliver my presentation, but then I was posed a series of very thoughtful questions for another hour. There was considerable interest in the impact of functional separation in the UK and the processes for handling consumer complaints in this country.
ANACOM is itself responsible for investigating consumer complaints. It receives some 3,000-4,000 a month and is becoming overwhelmed by them. It would like to be able to publish complaint data so that consumers are better informed, but the providers are fiercely resistant to this, arguing that the data would not be sufficiently robust and directly comparable. Of course, Ofcom has the same problem on publication of data from the Ofcom Advisory Team (OAT) in the face of Panel suggestions that the data would better empower consumers.
On the Panel, I take a special interest in next generation access or super-fast broadband. In Portgugal, they have no interest in fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) because the quality of the local copper line is poor. So all of Portugal's NGA is fibre to the home (FTTH). In the UK, the number of FTTH connections is still merely in double figures but I was advised that, in Portugal ( a nation of about 10M), it is already around 250,000.