BELTUG Update 26 AUGUST 2010

BELTUG Survey "the priorities of the ICT decision makers" again a big success!

Lobbying
1. No regionalisation of telecoms, please
2. Council of State confirms new BIPT council and jury
3. August 1: Lower tariffs for F2M – Time to talk to your fixed operator!
4. BELTUG’s exclusive Simbox simulator available at the beginning of September
 

Information and vision
1. Follow us on Twitter
2. Sharing data across borders - What are the legal risks and how can they be managed properly?
3. New presentations, case stories and reports available
4. DNS.be: implementation of DNSSEC and Annual Report 

Networking 
1. BELTUG welcomes new members
2. Consultation on experience with operators in the Persian Gulf region
3. Consultation on BBox
 

A grand total of 240 companies responded to our 2010 survey. If you were one of the participants – thank you! By giving us your priorities, you have made it possible for us to prepare an action plan that ensures we are working on the right topics. The results will presented at the Member Forum of October 5.

BELTUG, Agoria and the Platform of Telecom Operators together wrote all the presidents of the political parties in Belgium pleading with them not to regionalise telecoms. In the letter, we laid out the most important arguments against regionalisation: the regulatory difficulties, the inefficiencies for a sector in which economies of scale are key and the potential capacity problems for mobile networks (with Brussels being particularly hard hit). Already, telecoms operators are faced with a European ‘mosaic’ of 27 markets and 27 national regulators – and all the coordination problems this implies. The operators base their business plans and investments on these markets – let’s not diffuse them any further! 

We are very pleased that the Belgian Council of State has rejected the request of two former BIPT members to suspend the appointment of the new BIPT Board. The Council of State judged that the procedure that was followed to designate the new Board was correct. The State of Belgium as well as the members of the jury – including Danielle Jacobs, General Manager BELTUG - were being charged. The finding is a relief to us all, and the BIPT Board can now focus all its energy on resolving the challenges facing the Belgian market, in a spirit of transparency, cooperation and dialogue.
 

Since August 1st, BIPT has drastically reduced mobile termination rates (MTRs), as a result of which fixed-to-mobile tariffs should go down. As we mentioned in the June Update, the MTRs will decrease over three years:

Don’t wait: contact your fixed operator now to ask how you and your costs will benefit from the changes.
 

4.  BELTUG’s exclusive Simbox simulator available at the beginning of September

Do you still need simboxes? A lot of companies have been using them to reduce expensive F2M costs. But simboxes have their disadvantages.
BELTUG and Tam Tam Consulting have put together, exclusively for our members, a Simbox simulator that can help you determine if you still need your simbox(es).  Just fill in your data in the on-line simulator, and the tool can give you a comparison of your costs with and without the simbox. We’ll send out an alert to all BELTUG members when the Simbox simulator is available.
 

We want BELTUG members to be the best informed ICT decision makers and professionals.

We strive to ensure that our formal communications stream keeps our members up to date on our activities and on events in the market. Keeping up-to-date ourselves is part of this, of course. Now you can find us on Twitter, which offers us the possibility to communicate faster, with immediate updates on what’s happening. If you are interested, follow us on Twitter.

What’s more, you can find out what our members really think about us in the short (2 minute) film we put together on our VIP evening, which is now on YouTube (Dutch & French).

Privacy laws in the EU restrict the ways in which companies may handle personal information relating to their customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, etc.  One well-known example is the prohibition of transferring personal information to non-European countries that do not ensure an adequate level of data protection (e.g. making personal information available to an Indian provider of outsourced services). 
Renowned international law firm Allen & Overy has provided BELTUG with a briefing that explains the standard contractual clauses (SSCs) developed by the European Commission to protect personal privacy. The European Commission’s published model contracts and SSCs.

We regularly receive questions about this topic, so we have put it on the agenda of our next Member Forum, October 5. Tom De Cordier will guide you through the main potential risks of sharing personal information in an international environment, and will provide practical tips on how to manage these risks properly. 

DNS.be, the non-profit organisation set up in 1999 by BELTUG, Agoria and ISPA to register .be-domain names, focuses on infrastructure security. On August 18, DNSSEC was implemented. This is a DNS protocol designed to minimise deliberately incorrect redirects to fraudulent websites. Basically, DNSSEC checks that an address query (DNS) comes back in the correct manner from a dependable server. This prevents any ‘spoofing’ of DNS queries by fraudulent parties who deliberately pass on the wrong website instead of the site being requested.

Because of the importance of this topic, the DNS.be Annual Report includes a separate section on the technical aspects of DNSSEC.

One of our members needs to install several communication lines around the United Arab Emirates. If you have experience with operators and telecoms in the Persian Gulf region, they would like to hear from you:
- What problems did/do you face?
- Which operator delivers the most flexibility and the best service?
- Can this BELTUG member contact you?

You can respond by email

One of our members is currently migrating its Belgacom Teleworking lines from ADSL to VDSL with BBOX. However, it is experiencing connection problems with the BBOX, with some users being disconnected many times a day, without any apparent reason.
Investigation shows that the BBOX software is not always correctly handling the NAT (Network Address Translation). When an extra router that takes care of the NAT is placed between the LAN and the BBOX, the connection problems disappear.