The ruling was a result of a request made by Danish telecom operator TDC’s Swiss unit Sunrise on Swisscom’s market dominance.
Based on a study conducted by the Competition Commission, Swiss Federal Communications Commission judged that Swisscom has a dominant market position in broadband access compared to resellers as Swisscom is the only operator providing reseller offers.
However, Swisscom countered this by saying that the cable network operators are capable of making their own reseller offers and that there is active infrastructure competition, which has made Switzerland the country with the third-highest broadband internet usage globally. It also said that in 2006, infrastructure investments in Switzerland were approximately $272 per capita, higher than the European Union average.
The company said that its share of the Swiss broadband end-customer market in is less than 50%, which it claims is significantly lower than the average for other European countries.
Swisscom has 30 days to appeal against the ruling before the Federal Administrative Court. The company clarified that it is not obliged to offer regulated bit-stream access for the duration of the legal proceedings.
Earlier this year, German incumbent Deutsche Telekom had been the focus of a lawsuit filed by the European Commission against a legislation adopted by the German parliament. The legislation exempted Deutsche Telekom’s high-speed network from regulation and granted it monopoly on the broadband network.
Source: ComputerWire daily updates
