Frontier’s Associate Director, José María Rodríguez spoke today at the II conference on competition and regulation in the telecommunications market. His presentation focused on agreements in the telecommunications sector and the risk of foreclosure. José María discussed the different types of agreements in the industry, including co-investment, network sharing and joint ventures. He argued that these agreements are going to become more common given the current financial situation in the industry as well as the development of new technologies.

Although regulators and competition authorities have a long track record in analysing these types of agreements the new ones are likely to be more challenging therefore both companies and regulators will need to understand how far they can go to tackle the benefits of collaboration and at the same time maintain the competition in the market. In this respect, agreements to collaborate in “adjacent” markets, where telecommunications operators are new entrants, are likely to raise less competitive concerns. Nevertheless, this does not preclude the need of undertaking a thorough regulatory and competition analysis.

The conference is organized by the IESE and Cellnex and held on October 24th in Madrid.

Frontier regularly advises organisations and regulators across Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East on competition and policy issues in the telecommunications and media sectors.

For more information, please contact us at media@frontier-economics.com, or call +44 207 031 7000