Notified operators should report regularly to their NRA on their implementation of local loop unbundling, including statistical information for the items identified in the reference offer.

Notified operators should provide information and unbundled access to third parties under the same conditions and of the same quality as they provide for their own services or those of their subsidiaries or partners, and to this end, the publication by the notified operator of a reference offer for unbundled access to the local loop, within a short time-frame and ideally on Internet, and under the supervisory control of the national regulatory authority (NRA), would contribute, to create transparent and non-discriminatory market conditions.

However, notification of an agreement to an NRA does not make notification of an agreement to the Commission unnecessary.

Should the National Registration Authority (NRA) begin to carry out inspections itself, inspection reports will also be routinely transmitted to the importing Party until there has been a satisfactory verification of the NRA GMP inspection programme.

Secondly, it provides that the NRA must have a number of powers which it can use to influence or amend the interconnection agreements (43).

An NRA is a national telecommunications regulatory body created by a Member State in the context of the services directive as amended, and the ONP framework.

These provisions ensure that appropriate publicity is given to the agreements, and provide the NRA with the opportunity to take steps, where appropriate, to ensure effective competition on the market.

As regards actions before the NRA, the ONP Interconnection Directive provides that such an authority has power to intervene and order changes in relation to both the existence and content of access agreements.

The Commission therefore takes the view that an access dispute before an NRA should be resolved within a reasonable period of time, normally speaking not extending beyond six months of the matter first being drawn to the attention of that authority.

Notification to the NRA is not a substitute for a notification to the Commission and does not limit the possibility for interested parties to submit a complaint to the Commission, or for the Commission to begin an own-initiative investigation into access agreements.

Where an agreement has been notified to an NRA, but has not been notified to the Commission, the Commission does not consider it would be generally appropriate as a matter of policy to impose a fine in respect of the agreement, even if the agreement ultimately proves to contain conditions in breach of Article 85.

However, if a NRA were to require terms which were contrary to the competition rules, the undertakings involved would in practice not be fined, although the Member State itself would be in breach of Article 3(g) and Article 5 of the Treaty (51) and therefore subject to challenge by the Commission under Article 169.

The lack of competition in this area means that it is appropriate for the national regulatory authority (NRA) to impose obligations for pricing to be cost-oriented, based on specific principles and methods in order to achieve long-term sustainable and efficient competition and provide predictability to market players.

In addition to remedies under the competition rules, if no operator was willing to grant access, and if there was no technical or commercial justification for the refusal, one would expect that the NRA would resolve the problem by ordering one or more of the companies to offer access, under the terms of the relevant ONP Directive or under national law.