Mobile and personal communications

The Committee of the Regions welcomed the two proposals put forward by the Commission and stressed that further complementary measures were required as a matter of some urgency in order to complete the Community’s regulatory framework for the telecommunications sector, the aim being to create a genuine, open and dynamic telecommunications market under the deadlines set for the deregulation of this sector. The CoR proposed that the wording of the directive should provide for a set of regulations aimed at prohibiting discrimination between organisations operating public telecommunications networks in respect of the granting of public ‘rights of way’ for the ‘supply’ of these network services. The CoR wished to see the Commission’s proposals definitively approved as soon as possible and hoped that Member States would accept them officially without delaying their implementation and without evading any of the Community instructions. To this effect the Commission was called on to monitor the situation and to obtain from the Member States all the information that it needed to verify compliance with the directive. While agreeing with the objective of establishing a fully deregulated telecommunications system, the CoR was fully aware of the huge social impact created by the introduction of the information society and recommended that the Commission, when putting in place the required regulatory measures, should at the same time implement a series of initiatives linked to various basic themes outlined in the Green Paper, namely: - the development of employment opportunities in this sector; - the social implications of a fully deregulated telecommunications market; - the interaction between telecommunications policy and EU policy in related sectors, especially as regards data protection and consumer protection requirements; - the implications in respect of the impact of the new technologies on public health. As already highlighted in the Opinion on the Green Paper issued by the Committee of the Regions on 28 September 1994, the Commission was called on to intensify its research efforts, hitherto considered as insufficient, particularly as regards exposure to electromagnetic radiation and the role of regional and local authorities in issuing permits for the installation of aerials and for transmission equipment.