“It is necessary to simply the procedures and have a better coordination of public authorities,” said Liudmila Climoc, chief executive officer of Orange. The company found itself in the position of having made decisions to invest, allocated the money and forced to wait as much as nine to ten months to secure all the necessary permits to install a cellular tower.
“We need thousands of permits to expand the network,” said Miroslav Majoros, CEO of the Telekom group, adding there are armies of people on both sides, Telekom’s and the authorities’.
The ban on building overhead networks should be lifted in rural areas and suburbs and the required paperwork volume significantly cut, said Robert Redeleanu, CEO of UPC Romania & Hungary.
“We see no reason why we couldn’t build overhead [networks] in suburbs. The second thing is simplifying red tape: it takes an unimaginable effort, time and money,” Redeleanu said.
Romania will not achieve its Digital Agenda 2020 goals unless it simplifies the licensing procedures and better coordinates its efforts, said Ravinder Takkar, CEO of Vodafone Romania. “We are behind with our digital agenda goals.”
The communications market regulator should intervene and regulate the utility pole attachment rate because it has become unsustainable, said Valentin Popoviciu, vice-president of RCS&RDS. “Pole attachment rate in the US is somewhere in the neighborhood of $16 per pole a year. Electricity companies in Romania are charging more than EUR1 per cable per month.”
Telecom operators will invest more than EUR500 million in the development of local fixed and mobile telecommunications infrastructure next year, in order to reach as many customers as possible by boosting national coverage of Internet services, as Internet use has become one of the main growth drivers of the industry, the operators said at the ZF Digital 2016 conference.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)