Spanish Telefonia was ordered to pay a fine of 11 million euros for delaying the access of other service providers to a wholesale ADSL offer, going against a set of principles established in a 2008 regulatory decision.
The Telecommunications Market Commission, designation of the Spanish regulator, considers very serious the proven suspicions that the incumbent will have deliberately delayed the launch of an offer of indirect access to the Internet without fixed telephony by one year.
The regulatory decision, which Telefónica has already said it will appeal, follows a complaint filed by Vodafone in July last year, accusing the incumbent of failing to comply with the standards that had just been approved for the naked DSL.
With the revision of the regulatory rules in the country in 2008, it became possible to eliminate the binding, hitherto mandatory, for a customer who took advantage of broadband Internet services provided by a competitor to the incumbent, to maintain a fixed telephone contract. Following the decision, Telefónica was obliged to create a wholesale broadband offer, without associated voice telephone service.
It took more than reasonable to do so, says the regulator now. The company, for its part, guarantees that the decision is completely unfounded. It should be remembered that in Portugal PT was also recently the target of a heavy fine following practices considered by the regulator to be less appropriate in the ADSL market.
Here, the fine of 53 million euros revealed in September – which also affects Zon, at the time of the PT Multimédia facts – responded to a situation verified between 2002 and 2003.
