Co-investment and network sharing have become common practice for over a decade in the mobile sector and are making an inroad in the deployment of fiber networks in a number of EU Member States.

While competition law had to face co-investment cases since the 2003 T-Mobile/O2 mobile network sharing cases in Germany and the UK, co-investment is now making an entry into ex-ante EU electronic communications law. Under specific conditions of transparency and openness, the deployment of very high capacity networks by co-investors would not be subject to SMP wholesale access obligations.

The purpose of this BITS seminar is:

• To understand the welfare effects as well as the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities and the risks of co-investment in the deployment fixed and mobile telecommunications networks; 
• To understand under which conditions the markets alone will lead to co-investment and whether markets should be nudged towards such deals;
• To explore the consequences of co-investment on the possible emergence of competitive wholesale broadband markets and to assess the effect of continued wholesale access obligations on the incentives of market players to co-invest; 
• To gain a better understanding of the limits to co-investment in terms of competition law.