Still work to be done on telecoms regulation, says Cable Europe’s Kohnstamm

European telecom still needs fairer and more stable regulation, according to Cable Europe.

“Cable is presenting a growing and tangible contribution to economic recovery,” said Cable Europe president Manuel Kohnstamm, pointing to cable’s top-line growth of 7% last year. He said about half of cable’s footprint was now capable of receiving 30Mbps broadband.

He said that cost regulation for access was not an effective policy and that promoting infrastructure investment was the best route to more competition.

Kohnstamm said cable still needed more recognition that scale was important to its development. “Scale is a sheer necessity in our world, dominated by companies like Google,” he said. “Within the next five years you will see a greater clustering in the cable industry.” He said it was important that regulators abandoned out of date definitions of the market when deciding how much consolidation should be allowed.

Kohnstamm said that the European cable industry was nevertheless in better shape than ever before.