The Spanish regulatory authority has today published two detailed consultation documents: the first document is a 'pre-consultation', which contains a definition and analysis of the wholesale international mobile roaming market; the second document is a provisional analysis of (retail and wholesale) leased lines markets.

The documents, which are published for consultation, are not stricto sensu market definition and market analysis consultations as they are envisaged by Spanish Ley General de Telecomunicaciones and by the EU directives, but rather pre-consultation documents containing detailed data on the market size, market structure, market participants, market evolution over time, degree of concentration, characteristics of demand, etc.

As the CMT puts it, the objective in these documents is simply to provide a diagnosis of the markets, and to identify possible competition problems mainly related to the market structure. The CMT also emphasises that these documents are without prejudice to the formal market definitions that may eventually be formulated and that no inferences should be drawn about the identification (or not) of relevant markets for the purposes of ex-ante sector-specific regulation.

T-REGS Notes: Remarkably little distinction is made between retail and wholesale services in the document on leased lines, and this is clearly intentional, although this should not necessarily to be interpreted as meaning that the CMT intends to deviate from the European Commission's Recommendation on Relevant Markets Susceptible to Ex-Ante Regulation. As regards the product and geographic characteristics, it is clearly suggested that certain xDSL-based services could be part of the relevant product market (as a result of demand-side substitutability), whilst dark fibre is considered not to be part of the same market as leased lines. The CMT also concludes that the leased lines market is national in scope, but notes that there are geographic areas with a greater intensity of infrastructure-based competition.

The full text (in Spanish) of the 69-page document on leased lines can be accessed by clicking here.

The full text (in Spanish) of the 82-page document on wholesale international roaming can be accessed by clicking here.

The deadline for responding to both consultations is 24 June 2005.