The board of directors of Brazil’s telecommunications agency, Anatel, has approved the General Plan for Competition (PGMC—the acronym in Portuguese), aimed at encouraging and promoting free competition in the telecommunications industry, as well improving regulation.
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The PGMC establishes rules for sharing, interconnection fees and roaming. It also identifies dominant companies, those that have significant market power, and thus, need to share network access and transmission with smaller companies. The rapporteur for the case, Marcelo Bechara, named the operators Telefónica, Oi, América Móvil group, CTBC and Sercomtel for the fixed telephony market and Oi, Claro, TIM and Vivo in the same category for mobile termination.
The plan aims to promote competition, enabling future systematic evaluations, imposes more oversight on competitive performance and provides for a more accurate interpretation of the principle of minimum intervention in the sector.
Under the PGMC, Anatel assumes that although competition is the best regulator of markets, in virtually every country there is the need for measures to encourage competition, since there are providers who hold much of the infrastructure and customers, a situation that can prevent or hinder the entry of new players in the market.
Anatel said it will periodically evaluate several market issues, such as dominant groups holding significant market power, the necessity and appropriateness of regulatory measures, permanently overseeing the competition and intervening, when necessary, in conflicts between economic agents, in accordance with the General Plan for Competition.
In his analysis, Luís Osvaldo Grossmann from RCR Wireless News’ syndicate partner, Convergência Digital, noted that the main effects, those directed at infrastructure sharing, still depend on the submission and approval of “offerings of reference,” which may still take about five months.
To ensure access to infrastructure owned by dominant companies, Anatel’s move is aimed at providing transparency to wholesale offers. “There are already sharing obligations, but they are not met,” Grossmann said.
