a) Operators have their own, mainly economic, reasons for migrating to NGNs. These reasons will determine the timetable of investment in the new infrastructure. The reasons most often put forward include:
the need to be more competitive;
creation of new sources of revenue to make up for loss of revenue from traditional activities;
reduced operating costs;
managing the life cycle of past investment. The difficulty lies in managing this life cycle so as to ensure that migration has no significant impact on investment costs.
b) Consumers do not consume NGNs; they consume electronic communications routed via NGNs, and electronic communications contain content other than that linked to inter-personal communication, be it information accessible via the Internet, musical or audiovisual content, games, and personalized content and “self-made” products. Given that NGNs are a powerful tool for access to content sought by the consumer, the content industry and networks industry are now entering into a mutually beneficial relationship in which one complements the other: content providers supply traffic for the network operators in one direction, while in the other, the network operators enable content providers to reach a bigger audience. As a result, the sectoral regulators of electronic communications, whether or not their mandate includes regulation of content, will be called on increasingly to become involved in regulating relations between operators and content providers, as these relations are crucial to the efficiency of the end-user market for communication services in the broad sense.