BarcelonaBefore, when there were only landlines, houses were called. But the emergence of mobile phones has changed habits. Now you don’t call a household, you call a person. The trend, more accentuated among individuals, is also being imposed in business and professional communications, as noted by the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC), the supervisory body of the telecommunications market in Spain.
Thus, the data is clear: since 2020, call traffic to landlines has dropped by nearly 65% in the residential segment and by almost 35% in the business segment. “The average income per line has been reduced from 3.39 to 1.96 euros per month. If we consider the total voice traffic, both fixed and mobile, fixed voice traffic represents only 7.4%”, added the CNMC. The CNMC report also points out that the operator with the largest market share in terms of landline traffic is Telefónica, with 41%, followed by MasOrange with 29%.
Faced with this situation, the body that supervises the markets has decided to deregulate fixed telephony in Spain. The CNMC has approved the deregulation of the wholesale market for the termination of fixed calls, so that in the next six months the obligations to which the operators are now subject in this business segment will be withdrawn, as reported by the entity in a statement. The fixed termination service allows customers of one operator, whether fixed or mobile, to call users of fixed telephony from other operators. Therefore, the operator making the call pays a termination fee to the landline company that receives it.
In this way, all landline operators make calls to other operators and, at the same time, receive calls from others, so that all landline operators are both termination service providers and customers of their competitors. In this context, the market analysis carried out by the CNMC verifies, on the one hand, that the use of fixed voice calls is steadily losing weight.
No risk of excessive prices
From a wholesale point of view, the CNMC’s market analysis indicates that each operator acts as a monopolist within its network and that “there is no risk of excessive pricing” due to European regulations, which set a maximum fixed termination wholesale price of 0.07 cents per minute for all European Union countries. “The CNMC also does not see it as likely that the operators will fall into anti-competitive practices other than the setting of excessive prices (such as denial of access or discriminatory conditions). In the hypothetical case that happens, the CNMC could act through regulatory tools such as the resolution of conflicts or the imposition of symmetrical obligations”, warned the entity.
The CNMC has emphasized that, in addition to its analysis, it has also taken into account the observations of the European Commission and the public consultation launched in mid-May last to make the decision to deregulate the fixed call termination market.
