Emergency Services
Services given to the Public free of charge as defined from time to time by the regulator in consultation with the licensed Service Provider(s).

End User (or User)
Any natural or judicial person, excluding Providers of Telecommunications Services, purchasing, consuming or using Telecommunications Services solely for their own consumption. Irrespective of whether an End User is an individual, household, or institutions of any kind, such End User may not provide access to Telecommunications Services to persons outside their respective Defined User Group, nor provide access on a commercial scale or for profit. End users are Consumers.

E.164
An ITU-T Recommendation that defines the international public telecommunication numbering plan used in the PSTN and some other data networks.

EC
European Commission.

E-commerce
Electronic commerce.
Term used to describe transactions that take place online, where the buyer and seller are remote from each other.

ECOWAS
Economic Community of West African States.

EDGE
Enhanced data rates for GSM evolution.
It acts as an enhancement to 2G and 2.5G General packet radio service (GPRS) networks. This technology works in TDMA and GSM networks. EDGE (also known as EGPRS) is a superset to GPRS and can function on any network with GPRS deployed on it, provided the carrier implements the necessary upgrades. EDGE provides Enhanced GPRS (EGPRS), which can be used for any packet-switched applications such as an Internet connection. High-speed data applications such as video services and other multimedia benefit from EGPRS’s increased data capacity.

End user
The individual or organization that originates or is the final recipient of information carried over a network (i.e. the consumer).

End-user sharing
Intentional sharing of ICTs (mobile phone, PC, etc.) among end users, as part of the usual or normal operation of a service or application.

ENUM
Standard adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which uses the domain name system (DNS) to map telephone numbers to web addresses or uniform resource locators (URL). The long-term goal of the ENUM standard is to provide a single number to replace the multiple numbers and addresses for users’ fixed lines, mobile lines, and e-mail addresses.

EPOP
Expanding point of profitability.
A network topography where the network expands incrementally to unserved areas as they become profitable to operators. Newly connected areas can then be used as backbones to more remote areas as they eventually become profitable to providers.

Essential (also critical or bottleneck) facilities
Network facilities that may serve as bottlenecks to national or international capacities and act as a barrier to the provision of telecommunication services. The definition of such facilities varies by market.

Ethernet
A protocol for interconnecting computers and peripheral devices at high speed. Recently Gigabit Ethernet has become available, which enables speeds up to 1 Gbit/s. Ethernet can run on several types of wiring including: twisted pair, coaxial, and even fibre optic cable.

ETSI
European Telecommunications Standards Institute.

EU
European Union.

EUR
Euro.
The official currency of the Eurozone (European Union member States that have joined the European Monetary Union).

EV-DO
Evolution-Data Optimized or Evolution- Data only, abbreviated as EV-DO or EVDO and often EV, is a telecommunications standard for the wireless transmission of data through radio signals, typically for broadband Internet access.

Ex-ante and ex-post regulation
Ex-ante regulation involves setting specific rules and restrictions to prevent anti-competitive or otherwise undesirable market activity by carriers before it occurs; ex-post regulation, by contrast, calls for setting few or no specific rules in advance, but applying corrective measures and punishments if and when transgressions do occur.