The BIPT is publishing the fourth annual report on the monitoring of net neutrality in Belgium.
Some highlights:
- Especially by the end of the period covered by this report, COVID-19 had a particular impact on the BIPT’s net neutrality work. Even before the measures of the Belgian government came into effect, the BIPT organised periodical meetings with and reporting by the main operators in the sector in order to prepare the operators to keep on providing their Internet access service, despite the changing circumstances. Fortunately this turned out to be fruitful later in the field.
- No cases of blocking services or applications in the network have been found.
- As for the options for end-users the mobile data volumes included in the ISP offers have again increased, in order to set off the increasing mobile data traffic. Different “unlimited” tariff plans have been introduced on the mobile market as well.
- In the case of the zero-rating within Epic the opening up of the platform, decided during the previous reporting round, produced tangible results during this reporting round: the music streaming app of Tomorrowland, Audiomack (also music streaming) and TikTok were added to the tariff plans Epic beats and Epic combo of Proximus.
- As regards the (albeit temporary) offer of Fun Passes by Orange Belgium, the BIPT concluded, following analysis of the data obtained, that there was insufficient commercial room available for the competing CAPs and that the procedure for access to the zero-rating platform was insufficiently developed. Orange Belgium will therefore have to formulate a proposal meeting our concerns upon the new launch of a ‘Fun Pass’.