On May 22, 2020 the second meeting of the Steering Committee of the Twinning Project in Ukraine “Strengthening the Regulatory Capacity of the National Commission for the State Regulation of Communications and Informatization in the Areas of Market Access and Quality of Service Monitoring System” took place, where an activity report for the second quarter of this project was presented. Lithuanian and Latvian experts performed a comprehensive analysis of the situation and legal (acquis) monitoring of the quality of services (QoS) in Ukraine, also an analysis of regulatory gaps and market access issues.
The meeting was attended by representatives of the Lithuanian and Latvian regulatory authorities, NCCIR, the EU Delegation in Ukraine and the Center for the Adaptation of the Civil Service to the Standards of the European Union, Ukraine. Several significant changes have taken place in the project management team: the Ukrainian project leader has changed to Alexander Zhyvotovsky, the head of NCCIR, and the junior project manager has changed to Māris Sirmais, who was appointed by the Latvian Public Utilities Commission as its representative.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this time the representatives of the Steering Committee gathered not in the meeting room of the Ukrainian regulator, but in a remote video meeting. In view of the emergency situation, the project partners agreed to shift all project activities to the virtual space until positive changes were achieved and a safe return to normal working methods could be achieved. Despite significant administrative and organizational challenges, several remote expert missions have already taken place successfully. This project is one of the first EC Twinning projects to be carried out remotely.
“Remote expert missions are a big challenge because the aspects of their organization have not been described in any legislation or recommendations. Together with Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine, we were able to streamline all processes and successfully continue the project – during the quarantine, eight Lithuanian and Latvian experts successfully participated in remote missions”, said Feliksas Dobrovolskis, RRT Director and Twinning Project Leader in the video conference of the Steering Committee.
During the second quarter of the project implementation (December 8, 2019 – March 7, 2020), 23 expert missions of Lithuanian and Latvian regulators took place, during which the following results were achieved:
- an analysis of the existing service quality assessment and consumer protection system in Ukraine, its compliance with EU regulations was performed, and initial proposals for the improvement of this system were put forward;
- the definition of the retail market was assessed, descriptions of various network infrastructures and technologies used for the provision of retail broadband access services and projects for the assessment of their characteristics were prepared;
- the information collected by the Ukrainian regulator was analyzed to determine the suitability of the information for the research of selected markets.
Experts are currently preparing detailed guidelines for improving the service quality assessment system in Ukraine, in line with the EU legal framework and the practice of the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC).
More about the project:
The Communications Regulatory Authority of the Republic of Lithuania (RRT) together with the Latvian Public Utilities Commission since 2019, September implements the European Union Twinning Project in Ukraine “Strengthening the Regulatory Capacity of the National Communication for the State Regulation of Communications and Informatization in the Areas of Market Access and Service Quality Supervision”. The aim of this project is to strengthen and improve the capacity of the National Commission for Regulation of Communications and Informatization of Ukraine in the areas of quality supervision of electronic communications services, access to electronic communications networks and interconnection.
Project value: 1.3 million euros.
Project duration: 2019 September – 2021 June
Project number: UA 18 ENI TE 01 19.
The Twinning Program is an instrument of the European Union’s institutional cooperation between EU Member States and partner countries. The Twinning project is based on a direct exchange of knowledge and experiences.
Updated on 2020-06-09