The European Commission announced, on Monday 11 July, that it had made legally binding, under EU antitrust rules, commitments offered by T-Mobile CZ, CETIN and O2 CZ, as well as their parent companies Deutsche Telekom and the PPF Group, regarding the sharing of the Czech telecoms network.
O2 CZ and T-Mobile CZ are major operators in the Czech retail and wholesale mobile telecommunications market. O2 CZ’s mobile infrastructure has been transferred to CETIN, a network infrastructure company belonging to the same corporate group.
In its preliminary assessment, the Commission found that the network sharing agreements between CETIN and T-Mobile CZ as well as the Mobile Services Agreement concluded between O2 CZ and CETIN could have breached Article 101(1) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, which prohibits anti-competitive agreements (see EUROPE 12804/3).
The Commission found that the final commitments will remove the obstacles it found to competition in the Czech telecommunications markets resulting from the NSAs and decided to make them legally binding on the parties.
In particular, the parties undertook to:
- modernise the mobile network equipment to enable more flexibility and independence for the two sharing parties in certain radio frequencies (the parties will have the ability to roll-out the LTE 2100 MHz band throughout the Czech Republic and will be able to decide how, when and where to deploy 4G or 5G on the specific spectrum bands concerned by the commitments);
- review and change the financial conditions for unilateral network deployments in order to remove financial disincentives for such unilateral deployments;
- implement measures to ensure that CETIN effectively prevents information spill-over between T-Mobile CZ and O2 CZ in the context of the MNSA. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)