Thursday, August 26, 2004

German VoIP Consultation

REGTP has noticed that telecommunications networks will largely convert to packet switched technologies. Businesses are increasingly using IP-based applications for their internal and external voice communication. In Germany VoIP service offers also has been targeted at the mass market. The strong growth in broadband connections is now making this look a distinct possibility. Securing the interoperability of services and networks is therefore likely to become more important than ever for the regulators.

Guess who is the biggest voice over IP service provider in the US?

You probably said Vonage, which has roughly 200,000 paying customers. Wrong. There's another company with more than four times the subscribers delivering voice capability over broadband. It's a company you've probably heard of, though not in this context.

Give up? It's Microsoft, with its XBox live online gaming service. Xbox Live has over one million paying customers for multi-player online games. And all of them have a headset that plugs into the game console, enabling real-time voice communications with other players (TCS, August 25th, Kevin Werbach).


With the aim of the German VoIP Consultation, REGTP is seeking for clarification on how VoIP services should be regulated and how they are to be classified under the EC directives and the German Telecommunications Act. The main subjects of the public consultation are:

1.Competitive developments of VoIP;
- Business models
- Regulatory classification of VoIP models
- Numbering
- Access/ Interconnection
- Market entry barriers
2. Consumer protection and public interest
- Universal service, obligations for providers
- Telecommunications privacy
- Data protection
- Emergency calls
- Technical safeguards
- Technical implementation of intercepts
- Directory enquiry procedures

REGTP, without being explicit about it, is trying to implement the harmonised approach of regulation of electronic communications of the European Community. This approach is characterised by a three stage process with respect to regulatory obligations:
1. Market definition: NRAs define markets susceptible to ex ante regulation, appropriate to national circumstances
2. Market analysis: NRAs analyse the degree of competition on the market in a manner consistent with SMP Guidelines
3. Remedies: NRAs match the competition problems and the remedies avaibable.

Much of the consultation of REGTP has to do with stage one, the market definition:
- Is the concept of publicly available telecommunications services relevant?
- Is the concept of publicly available telecommunications network operator relevant.

I’ll have my fingers crossed. Kevin Werbach in his article in TCS, makes it very clear, that VoIP isn’t the same thing as telephony. The headset of the Xbox, enabling real-time communications with other players, the online users of Playstation 2, AOL’s ICQ and AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger offering voice chat features, the extensive VoIP functionality of Microsoft Windows Longhorn, all these developments make clear that voice communication will become a standard feature of many applications! By the way, I checked Microsoft didn't hand in a Stellungnahme to REGTP.

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