A boost to reliability - but not in the best way PTS

It is with some surprise that I read PTS Director General Göran Marby's latest blog entitled "Now we are raising operational reliability". The post starts well; we in the telecom industry should be very proud to work in an area that is so important to so many. And proud we are. Of contributing to social development, growth and not least people's participation in society.

But what Göran Marby then writes is that the market players must "accept that society makes demands on the business". As if the fact that the state makes demands on, and regulates the conditions for, Swedish companies were something new. When the case is rather that the players in the telecom industry are among the more reluctant when it comes to adapting their business to a long series of laws and regulations; the Electronic Communications Act and competition law as well as rules on data storage and data collection. And so on.

And when it comes to the current requirements on operational reliability, it is not the fact that PTS wants to impose requirements on market participants that the industry's criticism has mainly been about, but how the requirements have been set. That the regulation has not stopped at what is to be achieved, but has also dealt with how it is to be implemented. I think that this is what the industry's, and the individual players', criticism of PTS's proposal has been about, and this has been made very clear in our feedback to PTS. Hence my surprise at how Göran Marby chooses to describe what we are now facing.

Industry players have been positive about the PTS's ambition to ensure greater operational reliability because everyone understands how important the services they deliver are to customers. Delivering customer value is a matter of survival for all competitive businesses - including the telecom industry. Companies work hard and invest a lot in this. Every single day.

What we mean is that PTS has now chosen to introduce a short-term and detailed regulation that locks the market into specific technical solutions for backup power and redundancy that crowd out resources from other, more effective measures for increased operational reliability. The requirements also risk negatively impacting the IT policy objectives for broadband and mobile deployment. A more desirable way forward, as has previously been the practice, would have been to regulate at an overarching level and combine this with various forms of dialogue and agreements between market players and the authorities. We are convinced that this would promote market development in a more positive way.

What the players in the telecom industry have to do now is to comply with the regulations. But I hope that the next time the government thinks that market players should take more responsibility, we can focus on a constructive dialog between the industry and the authorities. We all - industry, government, citizens and customers - have everything to gain from this. Because customer benefit is a common goal.