This edition of Cullen International’s EU Timeline highlights key policy and regulatory developments foreseen at EU level until the end of 2026.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is preparing a public hearing in November 2026 to discuss stakeholder views on how to harmonise its four sectoral consumer protection codes into a single, unified code. This is the latest in a series of consumer protection proceedings the CRTC began earlier this year, and is part of its Consumer Protection Action Plan.

The Egyptian MCIT and the Ministry of Interior completed the regulatory frameworks needed to enable biometric SIM card registration using fingerprints. This is one of the main measures that aims to prevent fraudulent SIM card registration in Egypt.

The court repealed the Austrian regulator’s decision of 2022 to deregulate the wholesale markets for local access (market 1/2020) and central access (market 3b/2014). For the time being, the markets are regulated again under market analysis decisions adopted in 2017. The judgment raises questions to what extent a regulator is allowed to participate in negotiations between operators on wholesale offers.

The minimum required broadband speed will increase from the current 25 Mbps download/5 Mbps upload to 300 Mbps download/150 Mbps upload. Only connections offering at least 1 Gbps download/500 Mbps upload will be allowed to be advertised as ultra-broadband services.

BEREC, the assembly of European national telecoms regulators, welcomed the symmetric access rules in the proposed Digital Networks Act, in particular the clarification that NRAs may intervene on their own initiative where market structures require symmetric intervention. But BEREC argued that the rules should be further strengthened and simplified, notably by replacing the list of exemptions to symmetric measures with a simpler requirement to take proportionality into account.