Uncompetitive telecom markets are holding broadband speeds back, ...

Uncompetitive telecom markets are holding broadband speeds back, the European Competitive Telecommunications Association said Wednesday. Its study on Europe’s digital deficit said consumers and businesses are losing 25 billion ($34 billion) per year because powerful monopoly providers are keeping prices higher and broadband speeds lower. It said incumbent retail market shares are high, stable and, in some cases, increasing, and that some dominant companies are engaging in potentially anti-competitive and discriminatory practices. Meanwhile, ECTA said, new entrants struggle to make a return on their investment. ECTA said it will press the European Commission and national regulators to investigate competition failures in the sector and to consider using the new power of functional separation of a business’s network and services arms when needed. A study for the EC concluded that effective broadband take-up across the EU would create more than a million new jobs and boost gross domestic product by 850 billion by 2015, ECTA said. Separately, network operators said the EU digital agenda should be given higher priority and a stronger role in cross- sector issues such as CO2 reduction, education and social cohesion. Besides boosting jobs and economic activity, broadband-enabled applications in the energy, transport and building sectors could cut carbon emissions by 15 percent by 2020, the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association said. It again backed a “more targeted and proportionate regulatory environment” to encourage investment in risky next-generation access networks. Meanwhile, Point Topic analysts said emerging countries are now experiencing the largest growth in the number of broadband lines and will likely be the main drivers of broadband take-up in the next four years. By 2014, emerging economies could account for more than 320 million lines, 43 percent of the world total of 740 million by then, it said. The forecast looked at the 40 biggest countries in terms of broadband lines, dividing them into emerging, youthful and mature. The first category, which includes Brazil, China, Russia, India and others in Southeast Asia, South America and Eastern Europe, could see growth of more than 14 percent per year. Youthful economies such as the U.S., Japan, Greece and others, can expect broadband growth of 5.5 percent annually, mature countries such as Canada, South Korea, and advanced Western European nations 4.6 percent, the analysts said. The youthful markets are “probably the most unpredictable,” they said. With about 155 million lines as of mid-2009, they're just behind the emerging countries in terms of broadband size and they include the world’s two largest economies, the U.S. and Japan, they said. Individual countries in this group could see a change in prospects if governments set higher goals for broadband take-up, they said. It remains to be seen, however, whether the broadband investment plan in the U.S. stimulus package will boost take-up above the predicted 6 percent per year, the analysts said. The ten countries predicted to have the biggest broadband networks by 2014 are China, Russia, India and Brazil (emerging), the U.S., Japan and Italy (youthful) and Germany, the U.K. and France (mature), they said.