Brussels, 19/10/2015 (Agence Europe) - During the third annual BEREC Stakeholder Forum (Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications) on Thursday, 15 October in Brussels, which brought together around 180 participants, Commissioner in charge of the Digital Economy Günther Oettinger said that Europe needed a competitive telecoms sector that invested in quality services. In his speech, Commissioner Oettinger also underlined the importance of connectivity and the essential role telecoms operators played in ensuring this connectivity.
In her opening remarks, BEREC Chair, Fátima Barros, underlined the changes and challenges brought by the new digital ecosystem and highlighted the importance of the different stakeholders's inputs in the drafting of its opinion on the regulatory framework review, within the Digital Single Market initiative. BEREC Vice President, Wilhelm Eschweiler, introduced the participants to the main challenges of BEREC's work programme for 2016, emphasizing the tight schedule to implement the new rules for international roaming. The participants of the forum recognized BEREC's importance in assisting the European Commission on the Regulatory Framework review.
Participants were also introduced to the BEREC draft report on Enabling the Internet of Things. The report aims at presenting the most common M2M/IoT characteristics and assessing whether M2M/IoT services might require new rules. The multinationals Cisco and Microsoft gave their industry perspective in this area. The last session of the Stakeholder Forum was dedicated to the future opportunities and challenges for Europe in the digital ecosystem and what role BEREC could play in providing guidelines for this evolution. (Original version in French by Isabelle Lamberty)