Telecommunications
The Agency's International Activities - Telecommunications
On a European level, work with the European Commission is particularly important to the Bundesnetzagentur. This consists of fulfilling reporting obligations and participating in the Communications Committee (COCOM). The latter supports the Commission in exercising its executive power in the new legal framework and in regulating the .eu top level domain. The reporting obligations mainly involve collecting data for the Telecommunications Package Implementation Reports and for the Leased Lines Report (comparable to the national contributions in the benchmarking reports in the energy sector). In the telecommunications sector there are also the consultation and consolidation procedures carried out in accordance with Article 7 of the Framework Directive (2002/21/EC), a central element of the current legal framework.
Cooperation with other regulatory authorities is chiefly via participation in European organisations on a working and management level, and bilaterally via direct information exchanges with other national regulatory authorities such as the American Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
In the market regulation of electronic communications networks and services sector, the Bundesnetzagentur is a member of the Independent Regulators Group (IRG) and the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC), which replaced the European Regulators Group (ERG) in 2010.
For the frequency regulation and technical regulation sectors, the specialist departments are active on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology in European and international frequency coordination organisations, such as the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT, particularly in the Electronic Communications Committee, ECC) and the ITU Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R), in addition to the European and international organisations for technical cooperation such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T). The Bundesnetzagentur also works in the ITU Telecommunication Development Sector (ITU-D).