During the sixth session of the day entitled ‘Mobile Termination: to regulate or not to Regulate’, Dr. Vaiva Lazauskaite, Economic Analyst at ITU/RME, presented a summary of her discussion paper on Mobile Termination, ‘to regulate or not?’. She described the different regional perspectives on interconnection charging and regulatory approaches and listed the possible types of symmetric and asymmetric regulations. Dr. Lazauskaite is of the view that only in the short-term, different asymmetries could be justified, especially in the initial phase of a liberalization process and the development of competition, when regulators feel that it is necessary to support new market entrants. She also clarified that it is difficult to judge whether one particular regulatory regime is better than another. In fact MTRs applied in the Americas region and in the Europe and CIS regions are very similar, although there is no ex-ante price regulation in many American countries, while in Europe, ex-ante price regulation is prevalent. In addition a regulator should consider several factors before regulating MTRs, such as the degree of price competition prevailing on the market-place, the potential delays that could be incurred by reliance upon negotiation, the availability of regulatory resources, and the level of complaints concerning retail prices received from consumers.

Following Ms. Lazauskaite’s presentation, Dr. Treschow, moderator of this session, requested the panelists to comment on the points raised. The discussion can be summarized as follows:

• In most of the countries, mobile termination rates are regulated because those markets are still holding monopolies.
  
  
• MTRs need to be thoroughly regulated in two cases: when a player has significant market power or when a player has control over an economic market.
  
  
• Regulating mobile termination rates depends mainly on the maturity level of the market in terms of number of subscribers and traffic.
  
  
• If a market is mature enough and highly competitive there is no need to regulate mobile termination rates. It should be kept to negotiation among providers
  
  
• In case of Next Generation Networks, a single network could provide many services and reach high capacities; this will lead to a decrease in prices and establishment of bill and keep systems.
  
  

In conclusion, with the advances in technology and the migration to NGN, regulators will definitely have to thoroughly review regulations in place for interconnection and pricing. The fact that transport is much more expensive than peering, it might have a lower impact on termination rate in the environment of NGNs.