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BTK Turkey abolishes the minimum price regulation for retail mobile voice and SMS

Turkey’s telecoms regulator, the Information Technology and Communications Authority (Bilgi Teknolojileri ve Iletisim Kurumu, BTK) has abolished the minimum price regulation for retail mobile voice and SMS messaging services which had been imposed solely on market leader Turkcell since 2009. In a statement issued yesterday, Turkcell said that the regulation, which was scrapped with effect from 16 August 2016, has had a negative impact on its competitive strength, and added: ‘With the removal of the respective restrictions applied to our tariffs and campaigns, our company will be in a position to enrich the offer portfolio that meets our customers’ needs. The underlying reasons behind the lifting of this obligation are stated [by BTK] as developments in the mobile electronic communication market, the increasing significance of mobile internet service, the proliferation of over-the-top (OTT) services enabling communication over the internet, and the declining significance of voice and SMS services as compared to the period when the regulations were put into practice, as well as the decline in the proportion of on-net traffic and in the price difference between on-net and off-net calls.’

The minimum price rules required the average on-net prices of all Turkcell’s standard and promotional retail mobile voice/SMS tariffs to be set at over 1.7 times the wholesale mobile termination rates applied by Turkcell to rival operators per minute/number of SMS.



Source: https://www.telegeography.com/products/commsupdate/articles/2016/08/24/turkcell-freed-from-retail-mobile-minimum-price-regulation/?utm_source=CommsUpdate&utm_campaign=fccf0c264f-CommsUpdate+24+August+2016&utm_medium%3

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