Bulgaria

[BG] New Telecommunications Act 2003

IRIS 2003-9:1/33

Rainer Großhans

Institute of European Media Law (EMR), Saarbrücken/Brussels

The new Telecommunications Act of 23 September 2003 (State Gazette, issue 88, 7 October 2003) is meant to bring Bulgarian law into line with the acquis communautaire and to conduce to the liberalisation and opening up of services in the fixed network telephony market.

The Act places particular emphasis on the obligations of operators with considerable market power, the distribution of licences, the imposition of administrative charges and local loop unbundling. For example, it introduces a "must carry" provision (Art. 48), which obligates cable network operators to transmit public service broadcasting channels free of charge.

Under the previous Telecommunications Act, the telecommunications market (as well as fixed network voice telephony services, rented lines and cross-border real-time voice transmission) was, in principle, to be completely liberalised from January 2003. However, since the liberalisation of the fixed network voice telephony services market has fallen considerably behind schedule, the Act contains more extensive provisions on this subject.