Spain’s National Commission for Markets and Competition (Comision Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia, CNMC) has ordered Telefonica Espana to reduce the wholesale prices included in its existing Reference Leased Line Offer (Oferta de Referencia de Lineas Alquiladas, ORLA), by between 14% and 35%. The ORLA generally applies to corporate customers, which typically have higher bandwidth requirements than residential users, but also affects alternative operators, which use Telefonica’s infrastructure to connect their base transceiver stations (BTS) with their backbone networks.
The reduction in wholesale prices will also reduce tariffs for the use of submarine cables linking the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands with one another, and Ceuta (an autonomous city located on the north coast of Africa, sharing its land border with Morocco), with the Iberian Peninsula. The eight submarine cable routes affected by the reduced fees – the CNMC has proposed an average reduction of 35.6% – are Cadiz-Ceuta, Gran Canaria-Fuerteventura, Gran Canaria-Lanzarote, Tenerife-La Palma, Tenerife-Gomera, Hierro-Gomera, Mallorca-Menorca and Ibiza-Formentera.