Neelie Kroes aiming to drive fibre broadband investment

Internet service providers may face curbs on the profits they can generate from ageing copper networks to incentivise the development of fibre optic broadband.

Neelie Kroes, the EU telecoms commissioner, is set to announce new regulations that will force former state-owned telecoms firms such as BT to reduce the amounts they charge for wholesale use of copper infrastructure.

Similar measures have already been taken in the UK by Ofcom, which has imposed a reduction of 12 per cent below inflation on BT's wholesale access rates. The controls came into effect in August and will remain in place until March 31st 2014.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Ms Kroes said it may currently be more attractive for network operators to continue recouping profits from copper services than to shell out on costly fibre broadband deployments.

"I have the impression that in the current situation, it would be difficult to build fibre networks competing with cheap parallel copper networks," she declared.