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Implications of Brexit in EU Telecoms regulations

July 8, 2016 / in Articles / by

On 23 June 2016, the UK public voted to leave the EU. That means that, once Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty is applied, the EU treaties will cease in the British territory. Obviously, that also applies to the Telecommunications’ regulations.

These are some of the consequences that will come after this change of the UK and EU law:

 

GRAFICA-01-01Depending on the exact timing of a Brexit, it is possible that the reforms being prepared as part of the Digital Single Market (DSM) initiative will not be implemented into UK law, or if they are implemented, that they will not be maintained. A good example here is the proposed Regulation on the cross-border portability of online content services. It is possible that this will be adopted as a Regulation, before a UK exit date. The Regulation will then automatically cease to apply at the moment UK ceases to be a member of the EU. This may be welcomed by media rights holders (licensors) but unwelcomed to consumers and users of online content, because that will imply higher rates.

 

 

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Another important consequence of Brexit is that UK consumers will no longer be able to benefit from the Roaming Regulation in respect of their use of international roaming services, when travelling within the EU, so again, prices in both data and voice will be much higher. This also affects to UK telecom operators. They may increase roaming tariffs for non-clients but they will also receive higher tariffs from other EU telecom operators for their UK clients.

 

 

GRAFICA-01-03Also, an area where there could be some divergence between the UK and the EU is spectrum management and assignment. Following a Brexit, the UK will no longer be subject to Commission decisions and initiatives on the harmonisation of spectrum allocations and use across the EU.

 

 

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The ambitious targets of the Digital Agenda for Europe, or any other Commission policy for that matter, will no longer apply to the UK. It is unclear whether the UK will continue to apply these targets  once it leaves the EU, though it might, for example, give preference to the same or better broadband speed targets for ubiquitous broadband access.

 

 

Obviously, all this facts will affect both EU and UK companies operating in Europe. The new barriers of entry that will lead to a smaller market-place, may eventually affect their financial results, unless a new treaty, such as the EFTA, is approved.

 

The girls who could be engineers… but they got a Barbie instead.

April 28, 2016 / in Articles / by

Barbie

I have to recognize, my childhood was not a typical one. Every Christmas I wished to get the largest Scalexctric of the year, that fantastic electric race track as a Christmas gift, or what about the 2XL the Robot, the one asking you questions and you had to push buttons to answer them, or those toys that could look like if they already had some type of programming inside, do you remember the Fabulous Fred, electronic game? What a great childhood I had. I admitted it! I was the an only child and I can say that I was not bored with my electric cars and robots, while most of my girlfriends were given Barbie’s with hundreds of clothes so that they can dress them up and play. I will not deny that I went to many playdates with my friends and play with their Barbie’s and now that I think it thorough, I had fun playing with them, although I loved to play around with the designs of the dollhouses. We would create handmade fountains with real water, we would cut little flowery curtains out of painted paper by ourselves, and had lots of fun, but in fact, to play to be a Barbie, put clothes on and pretend to go shopping … not really, that was boring for me.

People that know me would agree that I always say how I wish I could go back in time, and be able to study engineering. I studied business administration and made several (many more than I would suggest) grades in business, negotiations, management, marketing, but none in engineering. In my family we did not have any close engineer, if any, we would usually aspire to be journalists, because of those, yes we had. May be later, when I had a little bit more of awareness, I also wanted to be a lawyer (because by then I thought I needed to be a lawyer to be president of my country … Yeah, I also wanted to be that). Dreaming is fantastic when you are a kid. Oh well, I ended up being president of a company, but not of a country (as of yet!).

Coincidentally life always took me to that “masculine” world of engineering and telecommunications. It always interested me, I loved to attend all the operations and technological meetings to discuss network architecture. It was an incredible challenge to try to understand more and more on how it worked. As many people (I’m sure), I always used to say: “Oh if I knew how to code”. Although it’s never too late to learn, every time I met a female engineer, immediately she would earned my admiration. Always thought that women have some advantages over men on issues regarding to management and organization. They have a natural sixth sense that helps a lot to solving problems. However, today, in search of that talent so unique, I have to say that almost no women engineers encounter.

4G penetration

According to a study published by the government of the United States, for decades the number of women studying science computer was booming, even this adjustment was moving much faster than in the male segment. But then, around early 80’s that percentage began its alarming decline.

One of the reasons according to other articles published by NPR has to do with the coincidental factor that by those days the personal computer came out to the retail market. They were being sold more like toys. It is at this point I remember my childhood as a young girl and a teenager. Yes, myself (even though I was never the typical girl who received the “girly” games) I always wanted the computer. I remember perfectly that birthday when I got a Commodore 64. I would spend countless hours writing thousands of lines of code just to make the screen color of the monitor to change from black to blue, and exhaust more hours to make them yellow! Yes, I know, it sounds a little bit “nerdy” but I loved it. However, let truth be told, at that time in my world, those who received these electric toys, were usually boys.
And now I finally understand the cause of my predicament: Why can’t I find female engineers? In the last two years, we have expanded operations to hire an average of ten development engineers. In the past 3 months I have done approximately 200 interviews to cover 10 vacancies and so far, none of the candidates to engineering and developers had been a woman. Every time I speak to headhunters I ask, “Please, find me a girl” but no…No girls found! There are many females in design, marketing, industrial relations, any many other industries but none of those girls are coding.

If we want girls to have a saying in how the evolution of the economy of this world happens today and in the future, we need to change the state of our mind from now on. More likely inadvertently our mothers, friends, sisters, cousins, are avoiding their daughters to become the next generation of workers and creators of the future technologies, which are very related to the mobile revolution.
Little the mothers of today know that are carrying on with the status quo of making their daughters princesses and queens of the home are causing a detrimental economic and/or intellectual harm to their daughters. Unless the principality or kingdom they find for those girls are one made of cables, codes and formats to learn and do innovative things, so they can become the next generation of women in science. Nonetheless, it is never too late, but for now, I will keep trying to learn how to code. The good thing is that this time, it will not take me 5 hours to write the code to change the color of my screen.

The transition towards 5G

January 18, 2016 / in Articles / by

Our digital society moves towards a new generation of communications, the 5G. This means, wired and wireless devices will use the same infrastructure, leading us to the next step of strategic technology thought to this “connected” society. The incorporation of IoT in our daily lives would be easier thanks to the ultra-high bandwidth that will serve to improve connectivity not only for users but for objects.

The goal of 5G is to be available for everybody. Not the case with 4G, which has been fully implemented by American carriers. Which is why Europe is now generating strategies to start the development of 5G technologies.

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Telecoms are leading Smart Cities

February 5, 2015 / in Articles / by

It is a fact that as population grows, the metropolis are expanding. People living in urban areas were no more than 29% by 1950, however in 2014 the number achieved the 54% and the proportion is increasing at a very rapid pace. The percentage is expected to grow up to 60% before 2025. More and more inhabitants choose to live in cities and experts have calculated that 1.3 million people are currently moving each week to metropolis. As a consequence, cities are becoming bigger. Nowadays, there are 21 megacities (conurbations with more than 10 million of people), whereas in 1975 there were just 3 (New York, Mexico City and Tokyo).

High density population cities require more water, transportation, place to live, public spaces and energy, and that is why finding solutions is a must. All the answers lie in technology and this is the background idea of “Smart Cities”. According to the European Parliament, ‘A Smart City is a city seeking to address public issues via ICT-based solutions on the basis of a multi-stakeholder, municipally based partnership’.

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