BERLIN — When the authorities have tinkered with European telecommunications rules, it has usually been to lower prices for consumers, whether through retail price controls on mobile roaming fees or mandatory cuts in regulated interconnection charges.
But this year, to encourage more investment in high-speed broadband networks, regulators are considering helping the biggest operators increase a main source of income: the rent they receive from rivals that lease their landline grids.
The architect of the plan, Neelie Kroes, the European Union’s digital agenda commissioner, has pitched the increases as part of a broader package to stimulate spending while preserving competition and consumer choice.
The plan, however, has alarmed operators that would have to pay the higher charges, like the British mobile operator Vodafone. Vittorio Colao, chief executive of Vodafone, said that the plan to increase the fees collected by former monopolies, including BT, Deutsche Telekom, France Télécom, KPN, Telecom Italia and Telefónica, could lead to a “re-monopolization” of the business.
Mr. Colao said he was worried that landline operators would use the additional revenue to lower their own prices and try to squeeze competitors like Vodafone.
“Increasing the incentive to invest is a good thing,” Mr. Colao said. But now Ms. Kroes must “demonstrate that these new criteria won’t contaminate the competitive arena in Europe,” he said.
Under the plan, the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, would begin regulating the fees that mobile operators routinely pay to lease the grids of landline operators.
In much of the world, running telecommunications lines to homes and businesses has traditionally been the domain of a local monopoly, or sometimes a duopoly in the case of telephones and cable television in the United States. Until 1998, countries in the European Union were allowed to maintain national monopolies for this “local loop” to the consumer.
With deregulation, however, the former monopolies were required to unbundle the cost of the local loop and offer it to competitors, thus allowing companies like Vodafone to enter the market.
Despite 14 years of deregulation, and the addition of more than 100 mobile operators in Europe, the former monopolies still supply the majority of fixed-line services in their home countries. In Spain, Telefónica has more than 70 percent of this business.
Until now, these unbundling rates have been set by national regulators, and the average monthly cost per customer in the European Union stands at €8.62, or $11.35. The fee typically makes up a third or more of monthly landline phone bills in Europe and also influences wireless prices because it affects mobile operator costs. The fee ranges from €4.20 in Slovakia to €12.41 in Ireland.
Mrs. Kroes proposed to lower, not raise, unbundling fees in September 2011, to make the old landline networks less profitable for big operators and to encourage them to invest in new networks. But the former monopolies protested, and after personal appeals from executives at big operators, in some cases accompanied by their investors, she reversed course.
Ms. Kroes is proposing that each country within the European Union be required to set its fee within the range of €8 to €10 per month, according to a copy of her proposal obtained by the International Herald Tribune. The new range would most likely require 10 E.U. countries where the fee is currently below this range to raise it, in some cases only slightly, and in others, sharply.
The increases would in all likelihood be passed on to consumers. The rise in fees could be greatest in Eastern Europe, where regulators have been most aggressive in setting low leasing rates to encourage competition. The level of leasing charges could double in Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Slovakia.
Mr. Colao, the Vodafone chief executive, said Ms. Kroes needed to tighten the legal safeguards in her plan to prevent big operators from exploiting access to landline networks.
