OREANDA-NEWS. June 03, 2014. “Even in 2010, FAS investigated around 300 mergers and acquisitions in the communications sector as part of control over economic concentration. In 2013 the figure was 90 – the reduction was more than threefold”, said the Head of the Department of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia) for Control over Transport and Communications, Dmitry Routenberg, oat “Telecom 2014: Pressing Legal and Tax Issues” PBC Conference.

“The dynamics is determined by the changes in the antimonopoly law as well as a general decrease in investment activity”, added Dmitry Routenberg. “The number of violations also reduced, primarily, due to the institution of warnings”.

Important attendees also included Deputy Head of the Federal Communications Agency, Roman Sheredin, who discussed the main areas of developing the telecommunications sector in 2014, and the Head of the Legal Section of the Association of Regional Communications Providers, Vasily Levchik.

In his presentation on “Antimonopoly Regulation of the Market of Communications Services”, Dmitry Routenberg, outlined the main market trends: “A project for deregulating the services of local, intra-zone, long-distance telephony is launched, the expediency of which was recognized by the Government Communications Commission on 30th September 2013 on the basis of FAS Report”.

The speaker emphasized the results of employing MNP services (mobile number portability). “Unfortunately, the statistics is comfortless: around 50% of applications for number portability were not granted. It is beyond doubt, however, that MNP encourages competition development and increases the quality of services, and generates significant savings for the federal budget through public procurement. Next in turn is FNP (fixed number portability), expediency of which is becoming more obvious with every passing day”.

The speaker also did not neglect technological neutrality as an essential condition for competition development: “We understand technological neutrality considerably wider than a traditional interpretation on control of the radio-frequency spectrum. We say that the entire communications control must be built on this principle, including licensing, interaction between telecommunications networks and the rules for rendering communications services”.

“Virtual providers became another step towards improving the market. It is especially important under limited resources of radio-frequency spectrum available for building telecommunications infrastructure”, emphasized Dmitry Routenberg.

In conclusion, the speaker covered the issue of network neutrality, which, according to FAS, must ensure possibility of receiving “new” services provided through communications networks often competing with “traditional” services. “We think it is acceptable to allow providers to control traffic subject to devising trading policy, open to public, and to make their activities transparent and non-discriminatory”.