An interview of Paul Champsaur, president of ARCEP, the French regulator, was published in Les Echos dated June 6th under the title "Il faut créer les conditions d'une concurrence dans le très haut débit". Much as I'd like to translate for my readers, for legal reasons, I can't do it. Let's summarise the main positions instead:
- Champsaur sees the French moves on FTTH as a consequence of the high deployment of ADSL2+. The intermediary VDSL solutions in deployment in Germany or the Netherlands don't offer enough difference with ADSL2+ to make sense on the French market.
- ARCEP intends to enforce a symetric regulation: since the incumbent is starting on this new market at the same time as it's competitors, no reason to enforce different rules.
- One of the main issues currently is avoiding de facto geographic monopoly whereby the first operator to pop a building will be the only one to do so. That implies some form of sharing of the vertical network. Champsaur announced ARCEP proposal to that effect in the Fall and hopes for effective agreements between operators in Spring 2008.
- Another issue is France Telecom's extensive pre-existing duct network. ARCEP wants to encourage the incumbent to propose a wholesale rent offer to its competitors. This offer would be regulated and Chapsaur hopes it could be launched in Spring 2008.
- Finally, there's a significant issue for all players in the FTTH field, which is access to premium contents. Since Canal+ purchased TPS two years ago, they have become an effective monopoly on Premium contents in France and it's proving extremely difficult for service providers to resell that content. Champsaur acknowledges the issue, but doesn't suggest ways it can be resolved.
Obviously it's hard to understand what the regulator is working on based on a simple interview. However, it seems to me that the ARCEP seems to take it's time forging itself an opinion on issues that are already having an impact on the field since all three major players (FT, Neuf and Free) are pushing hard to build-up an installed customer base. I'm worried that by the time the regulator finally enforces any kind of regulation on the issue, the battle for Paris will be over, and many customers will be frustrated on the outcome.
I'm also surprised that Champsaur didn't discuss issues of digital divide. It's already hard to imagine short-term profitability of FTTH in Paris and the major French cities, I can't imagine how long it'sgoing to take for a commercial operator to connect a small-town customer, let alone a rural one...
