Fixed telephony and broadband penetration in Albania are amongst the lowest in the region, says the report.
TIRANA, April 28 – The independence of Albania’s national regulatory authority on electronic communications, AKEP, remains hampered by political influence, says the European Commission in a report on enlargement countries.
“The national regulatory authority, AKEP, was established in 1998 as an independent legal entity. However, its independence has in practice been hampered as parliament repeatedly replaced the entire board upon government initiative. Spectrum management and tariff regulation have been subject to strong political influence,” says a report prepared by Cullen International for the European Commission.
“Political interventions to replace individual AKEP board members had also occurred shortly before and after the June 2013 elections and mirrored in both cases the party politics at the government level. The administrative capacity and resources of the regulator and the ministry remain limited,” added the report.
The alignment of the national regulatory framework for electronic communications and information society services has developed slowly, but gained speed over the past four years. Major progress has been made with the adoption of primary legislation based on the EU 2009 regulatory framework in October 2012 and the Audiovisual Media Service Directive in March 2013. Practical implementation, however, has often been hampered by a lack of institutional stability as well as frequent political interventions, notes the report.
The Albanian mobile market has undergone rapid growth fuelled by competition among four mobile network operators. The deployment of mobile broadband, however, has been hampered by the late introduction of 3G services and further regulatory measures are required to complete refarming of 900 MHz and 1800 MHz spectrum for 3G and 4G mobile broadband services, says the report.
Fixed telephony and broadband penetration in Albania are amongst the lowest in the region, says the report.
Fixed lines penetration stood at 11 percent in 2012 while fixed broadband penetration was at only 5.7 percent. Turkish-owned Albtelecom remains the dominant fixed player with 89 percent market share by voice traffic and 67 percent by revenue. Competition has emerged in the fixed broadband market, with alternative operators providing 58 percent of the connections over their own infrastructure.
Albania, which until 2007 had the highest fixed to mobile call charges, has also seen sharp reductions and currently presents fixed to mobile call prices aligned with the average level in other monitored countries.
The report also cites a decision on a probe by the country’s competition Authority on Vodafone’s alleged abuse of its dominant position as “creating competition concerns in the mobile market and may have negative effects for the smaller competitors in the long term.”
This report concludes the series of four interim study reports produced in the period from 2011 to 2014 in the context of a European Commission’s project monitoring the electronic communications and information society sectors in the nine countries that have been taking part in an ongoing process of the enlargement of the European Union.
