According to Noam,1 “The central question for telecom – and for many other media – is how to generate the funds and invest in upgraded infrastructure, while being subject to competition”. Investment in next generation access network is needed to deliver broadband services with significantly higher bandwidth than today. This will allow the development of more innovative and better services. Investments under competitive conditions require a positive business case, which might not be viable for long-lived assets like fixed access networks. This might lead to the situation where we can only have competition or a next generation access network but not both. This paper looks at the aspects of investments in next generation access (NGA) networks and competition and specifically focuses on potential effects of the EU commission draft recommendation on NGA.
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