Public consultation on the draft BEREC Report on submarine cables connectivity in Europe

Deadline: Friday, 11 July 2025 (CoB)

During the 63rd BEREC plenary meeting (5 June 2025), the Board of Regulators has approved the draft BEREC Report on submarine cables connectivity in Europe (BoR (25) 85) for public consultation.

This draft report provides an overview of the domestic submarine cables in BEREC member countries, the main purpose for their deployment, the ex-ante economic regulatory regime adopted in each country and its evolution, and it identifies some potential challenges and emerging trends.

In order to have a better overview of the domestic submarine cable systems ensuring communication services in Europe, BEREC collected information from its members, through a dedicated questionnaire, and complemented it with publicly available data.

BEREC also provides a deeper analysis of three case studies to give more detail on the economic regulation and remedies adopted in Iceland, Portugal and Spain.

The report is organized as follows: Chapter 1 lays out the introduction to the report, Chapter 2 provides a general overview of domestic submarine cable systems that ensure communications services, distinguishing between purely domestic submarine cable connections and the domestic segments of international cable systems within the BEREC member countries, and characterizing their age, financing models and other relevant attributes. Chapter 3 outlines the applicable legal framework. Chapter 4 reviews the historical and current economic regulatory approaches to domestic submarine cables. Chapter 5 presents selected case studies, offering a more detailed analysis of regulation and regulatory measures adopted in some countries to specific submarine cables, and the reasoning for the remedies imposed. Chapter 6 identifies the main challenges and emerging trends, and the main conclusions of the report are presented in Chapter 7.

Submit your contributions

Interested parties are kindly requested to submit their contributions here by 11 July 2025 close of business.

After submitting the contribution, an acknowledgment email will be sent to you. Contributions should be sent in English and, in order to facilitate processing of the responses, the comments provided should clearly refer to certain sections/subsections/paragraphs of the document.

In accordance with the BEREC policy on public consultations, BEREC will publish all contributions and a summary of the contributions, respecting confidentiality requests. Any such requests should clearly indicate which information is considered confidential and be accompanied by a non-confidential version.

We strongly encourage all stakeholders to submit their contributions as early as possible. Contributions received after the above mentioned deadline will not be taken into account.