This Report's Structure

ICP - Autoridade Nacional de Comunicações (ICP-ANACOM), under the terms of its Statutes¹, is bound to send every year the Regulation Report to the Government, also to be submitted to the Parliament.

As with the Regulation Report 2006, this is a specific document that will not include the section on the State of Communications, nor the Activities Report, for as the three publications’ goals, rationale and even issuance dates are different.

We remind that the Regulation Report offers an outlook of ICP-ANACOM's regulatory activities, which also has other duties, assigned to it by its Statutes or by other legislation, as commonly known, with boundaries between them not always obvious. However, we do believe that, as in previous years, the main facts of ICP-ANACOM's activities in the field of market regulation are well portrayed in this document.

This Report's structure is similar to that of 2006, showing ICP-ANACOM's main regulatory tools and its means of intervention. Thus, regarding electronic communications, it presents the Regulator's three fundamental action areas, namely:

(i) market analyses and the consequent imposition of duties on the companies with significant market power (SMP), particularly regarding regulated reference offers;

(ii) frequency and numbering management;

(iii) monitoring of the universal service (US), mainly regarding prices and quality of service, and also covering the postal services sector.

This report also covers other ICP-ANACOM's more specific activities, namely in connection with user protection, communications' safety and with supervision, monitoring and sanctioning. It also contains references to cooperation with other entities, particularly the Competition Authority (AdC), and participation at numerous international bodies as the National Regulatory Authority or in representation of the Portuguese State.

The Report ends with a set of final considerations highlighting the main challenges faced by regulation.