December 16, 2019

Following a call for initial input BEREC has now published its report on the impact of 5G on regulation and the role of regulation in enabling the 5G ecosystem.

BEREC notes that the development of the 5G ecosystem involves many aspects of regulation. How it develops as take up increases and service propositions emerge has the potential to affect regulation further. How regulatory impacts are addressed could affect the pace at which innovative services are brought to market as the full market and consumer benefits of this new technology are realised.

The BEREC Planning & Future Trends Working Group (PFT WG) was tasked with developing a report that aims to help National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs) for electronic communications anticipate where and how 5G deployment may have an impact on the regulatory environment.

The PFT WG sought to undertake a “horizon scanning exercise” and posed a range of questions such as how services might be rolled out, how markets might develop, and how any of these might raise new regulatory challenges for NRAs. BEREC says that the report makes clear that new regulatory challenges does not mean more regulation per se, but could also mean less or more proportionate regulation.

The Call For Input posed a series of questions on a variety of topics ranging from privacy and security, competition and potential competition bottlenecks, and on more technical issues such as network slicing, numbering in an IoT/ M2M world and interoperability of technologies and networks. The questions were also accompanied with some suggested examples of how issues might arise in a 5G context and, based on these examples, stakeholders were asked for their views on work that might be taken forward in the future.

More than forty responses were received from a variety of sectors, ranging from network operators, service providers, manufacturers, application providers, industry and consumer representative organisations, as well as research and advisory bodies.

Overall, and given the current state of play of commercial 5G deployments, BEREC says that it is confident that NRAs and BEREC are thinking about the right things (for example, authorising rights of use to spectrum in suitable ways to satisfy various connectivity demands, or addressing perceived uncertainty in the BEREC Guidelines on Open Internet) and some of the issues raised are currently being looked at in other BEREC Working Groups. To access the Report in full, click here.