RD384 - ETNO Response to [Draft] EU Guidelines for the Application of State Aid Rules in Relation to the Rapid Deployment of Broadband Networks

ETNO supports the Commission’s recently announced new policy / regulatory approach for the broadband investment environment and believes that the revision of the State aid Guidelines for broadband networks should take due account of these new objectives.ETNO agrees with the European Commission’s cornerstone principle that public funding should remain complementary and should not substitute the investments of market players.State aid measures should not try to determine technology choices but rather should remain technology neutral and support the market’s choice of th

  • ETNO supports the Commission’s recently announced new policy / regulatory approach for the broadband investment environment and believes that the revision of the State aid Guidelines for broadband networks should take due account of these new objectives.
  • ETNO agrees with the European Commission’s cornerstone principle that public funding should remain complementary and should not substitute the investments of market players.
  • State aid measures should not try to determine technology choices but rather should remain technology neutral and support the market’s choice of the most appropriate and efficient technologies and services to reach the Digital Agenda targets.


ETNO welcomes the opportunity to express its views on the draft “EU Guidelines for the application of State aid rules in relation to rapid deployment of broadband networks” (hereinafter the “draft guidelines”).  
ETNO believes that investments needed to deploy broadband infrastructures for the upgrade of traditional networks and for the deployment of new, next generation networks (NGN) should come primarily from the private sector and from private investors wherever commercially viable, to avoid any distortion of   competition. The use of public funding may be useful in those cases where private investment plans are not sufficiently in place in order to bring broadband and all the related social and economic benefits to unprofitable areas or to areas only profitable for one network operator which does not provide sufficient broadband coverage or where the access conditions are not adequate. In other words, public funding should never crowd?out private investments, as rightly acknowledged by the Commission in the 2009 Guidelines.
Therefore, ETNO welcomes the fact that the Commission recalls this cornerstone principle in paragraph 4: public funding should indeed remain complementary and not substitute the investments of market players.