Spain’s telecoms regulator CNMC has ordered Telefonica to lower the rates it charges Vodafone and Orange for wholesale access to vertical infrastructure and the provision of FTTH connections to the same rate it charges broadband provider Jazztel. Back in October 2012, Telefonica and Jazztel agreed to jointly deploy fibre-optic infrastructure to reach over 3 million Spanish households, or 1.5 million households per operator. Vodafone and Orange subsequently reached a similar joint rollout agreement but still relied on Telefonica for the final hop into the buildings. According to the CNMC, the prices agreed between Telefonica and Jazztel are “reasonable and must also be applied to Orange and Vodafone for accessing this infrastructure”. As a result, the prices charged by the incumbent operator will be reduced by around 34 percent on average and will need to be applied on a retroactive basis, said the CNMC.
The regulator’s decision was issued after a one-year investigation into Telefonica’s wholesale access rates and follows a complaint from Vodafone that Telefonica's agreement with Jazztel was part of a strategy to make it impossible for other operators to compete. The CNMC reported that at the end of the first quarter of 2014, there were 7.35 million FTTH accesses in Spain, 83.5 percent of which belong to Telefonica. However, only 745,000 of these lines are currently in service.
