EU issued a statement to cope with increased internet traffic load

To cope with the increased traffic load due to the Covid-19 pandemic The Body of the European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC) and the European Commission have issued a joint statement. Tho organizations are setting up a special process in order to monitor the situation and be ready to respond to any crisis of supply on the telecom network.

Major congestion problems

Pursuant to the Open Internet Regulation operators are authorized to apply exceptional traffic management measures, inter alia, to prevent impending network congestion and to mitigate the effects of exceptional or temporary network congestion, always under the condition that equivalent categories of traffic are treated equally.

The BEREC Chair Dan Sjöblom said after the Board of Regulators voted on the statement,

“We are currently not seeing any major congestion problems and network operators seem to be coping well with the higher traffic load in the networks. But we nevertheless need to stay vigilant and be ready for if the situation changes. This is an extreme and unprecedented situation we are witnessing and we have seen over the past couple of days just how quickly things can change.”

BEREC also stated,

“BEREC is in the process of establishing a special reporting mechanism and we will clarify how this will work in further communication. We expect this work to be ready soon, as we are not looking to build a completely new monitoring structure, but rather strengthening already existing mechanism for information sharing among National Regulatory Authorities.”