Kroes laid out her plans at a meeting on “guaranteeing competition and the open internet in Europe” on Tuesday morning. Here’s a breakdown:

• One size may not fit all — ISPs should be able to offer connections with guaranteed quality of service, with regular subscribers getting a “best efforts internet”.
• Transparency — People signing up to internet packages should be clearly told what is included, what is not, and what speed they can expect.
• Easier switching — It must be easier to switch provider. Barriers including “excessive charges, modem hire or email addresses” will be “removed”.
• No blocking/throttling — ISPs and carriers will not be able to deliberately degrade or block services that rival their own, such as VoIP or messaging services.

That last one is arguably the most important new proposal: for the first time, it will not be legal for a mobile carrier to block or throttle Skype usage, for example. However, it won’t answer all the concerns of net neutrality advocates.

The basics

Let’s remind ourselves first of what net neutrality means in practical terms: the idea that all services get treated equally on the internet. Some real die-hards will argue that it should mean the banning of traffic management, but that’s unworkable and frankly it clouds the debate. What we are really talking about is maintaining a truly open and competitive market for internet services.

Blocking and throttling services is a flagrant and very widespread abuse – European regulators have estimated that 236 million mobile subscribers in Europe are blocked from using Skype – so obviously it will be good to see that go. But what about more subtle attempts at favoring some services over others, such as Deutsche Telekom’s current ploy?

As we reported in April, Deutsche Telekom is introducing usage caps on its fixed-line internet services. The ISP’s own entertainment services, often bundled with its internet connectivity, do not count towards these caps. So, in effect, customers are being steered towards the use of these services and away from that of Netflix-style rivals, because the use of the latter services might mean hitting those caps and seeing a slowed-down connection as a result. This is a disincentive for startups that might want to set up new services in Germany to rival Deutsche Telekom’s in-house offering.

It’s far from clear that the European Commission’s new proposals would stop such behavior. Similarly, there is nothing in there to stop a different kind of net neutrality abuse: ISPs charging content providers for carrying their traffic. In fact, the acceptance of the idea of a two-speed internet – for this is what Kroes is in effect describing – makes this sort of development more likely.

If there’s a fast lane in place, carriers can go to content providers and ask: “Would you like to be part of that lane, or relegated to best efforts?” The result? Entrenched and deep-pocketed providers would be able to pay, while their newer, smaller rivals would not.

Cloud impact

One of the speakers at the Brussels meeting was James Waterworth, the vice-president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA). He pointed out that it’s all very well to introduce transparency requirements for consumers, so that they understand what they’re signing up for, but that doesn’t do much for businesses:

“Because cloud services depends on network effects, transparency will not work. If you are the CIO of a company with a salesforce who move around, who go between 5-20 sites, possibly across different countries, if you want to deploy a productivity suite you’d have to know which productivity suites can or cannot be used on all the different connections your workforce will travel to. That’s impossible.”

And then there was the contribution of law professor Chris Marsden, of the University of Sussex. He suggested there was a fatal flaw in the argument of ISPs who want to bypass net neutrality – they say they need to place limitations on connectivity in order to deal with the “data explosion”, but there is in reality no such thing. Marsden noted that figures from Cisco itself – remember, a company trying to sell carriers kit to cope with this supposed explosion – indicated a manageable increase in the amount of data people are using:

“There is no data explosion on the European internet, so we shouldn’t be trying to make policy based on a fallacious assumption,” he said. “If we keep talking about data explosions, the thing that’s going to explode is the heads of the technical people who know there is no data explosion.”

Whether or not you agree with Marsden’s interpretation of Cisco’s figures, his point highlights an inherent logical contradiction in the carriers’ stance: if the “data explosion” is so severe as to necessitate the creation of fast lanes with guaranteed quality of service, doesn’t that mean the “best efforts” slow lanes will necessarily be slower than the equal-access lane we have today? And if that’s not the case, then why create divided classes of internet access? They can’t have it both ways.

U.S. comparison

Kroes’s proposals are not that dissimilar to those brought in by the U.S. Federal Communication Commission (FCC) a couple of years back (rules that are currently back in court due to the displeasure of Verizon). Those rules also mandate transparency and stop fixed-line providers from discriminating against certain types of traffic, although they are somewhat more lenient towards mobile providers – a distinction Kroes doesn’t appear to be making. And like the European Commission’s proposals, the FCC’s rules leave scope for a two-speed internet.

In short, the FCC’s rules were what the uncharitably-minded might call “a fudge” or, in kinder terms, “net neutrality lite”. It appears that Kroes is aiming for something similar, albeit without the short-sighted split between fixed and mobile connections.

In some ways it is understandable that she is doing so. The commissioner is desperate to introduce Europe’s first net neutrality legislation ahead of next year’s European Parliament elections, which threaten to fill the parliament with people who want to end the European project. She wants to show that the concerns of the ordinary person – particularly the younger ordinary person – are being taken into account.

The problem is, net neutrality is a relatively abstract concept that will never excite most people until it’s gone. The other part of Kroes’s big push – the abolition of mobile roaming premiums within the single market – is a much more sure-fire vote-winner.

If the proposals she is making don’t do the job, and if they’re not connected with winning the carriers’ acceptance of lower roaming fees, perhaps they shouldn’t be rushed.

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Might lower mobile roaming charges and a net neutrality guarantee help save the day? It may sound absurd, but that is indeed the gist of a major speech given this morning by Neelie Kroes, the EU’s digital chief. And Kroes wants to move fast: her team tells me the plan is for official proposals to be published “by September at the latest” before seeking approval from member states by October and the European Parliament by December. If successful, the proposals would be law by Easter next year.

Highlighting relevance

Kroes, who is also a vice-president of the European Commission, has already been the driving force behind the lowering of mobile roaming costs within the EU (a project begun by her predecessor, current justice commissioner Viviane Reding). This does have real relevance to the promotion of the single market – if you want to make citizens of the various EU member states feel as one, removing barriers to their free movement is a pretty good start.

She has also been consulting about the potential need for guaranteed net neutrality, and what that guarantee might look like. Up until now, though, she’s appeared very cool on the need for change.

But now Kroes wants to eliminate roaming premiums and set net neutrality (in some form) in stone, all in the name of European unity. Quick context primer: the European Parliament elections are next year, and EU authorities are petrified that the Parliament will suddenly be filled with parliamentarians who want the EU to be dissolved or downgraded.

From today’s speech, which was largely directed at Malcolm Harbour MEP, the chair of the Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection:

“You and I share the stake in this debate, so tell me: will you join me in building something special between now and the European elections? I want us to show citizens that the EU is relevant to their lives. That we made the digital rules catch up with their legitimate expectations.

“I want you to be able to go back to your constituents and say that you were able to end mobile roaming costs. I want you to be able to say that you saved their right to access the open internet, by guaranteeing net neutrality. I want you to be able to say we took real action on cybercrime and other threats.”

Kroes does have a point: the capping of roaming charges has been an unequivocal vote-winner. When many people see Europe (with some justification) as needlessly bureaucratic, no-one can argue with the benefits of cutting the telcos down to size on what are mostly unjustified roaming charges. Most people also see an open internet as a good thing, although the benefits are less tangible — many will find it hard to appreciate what the alternative might look like.

Battleground revisited

But Kroes’s new plan is nonetheless highly ambitious. Let’s leave net neutrality aside for a moment – her position on that has always been quite mysterious and there are no new details to hand as to what she might now be proposing.

On the roaming front, the current plan for lowering charges involves annual steps on the ladder, with each step taking place at the start of a July (just in time to please holiday-makers travelling around the continent). The last rung is scheduled for July 2014, and Kroes is now promising a whole new reform package that will be delivered “around Easter 2014″: ahead of July, and ahead of those crucial elections. And that new package will involve eliminating roaming costs entirely, not just minimizing them as the current package does.

The plan that’s already in place is quite complex: not only are roaming costs being capped, but carriers are also due to be forced to decouple their roaming tariffs from their domestic tariffs, so that people who are (quite reasonably) selecting their carrier on the basis of their domestic offerings don’t get locked into those carriers’ roaming deals as well. This second, structural part of the reform is designed to stimulate a new generation of mobile virtual network operators that specialize in offering cheap roaming deals.

In other words, the major carriers already loathe Kroes, and now she’s potentially preparing to add insult to injury – we don’t know how much insult yet, as the speech didn’t contain any detail, but she did say she was talking about “a radical legislative compromise”, whatever that means.

As Kroes closed her speech:

“So if you believe in the single market; if you believe in a strong Europe that makes a practical difference to each citizen’s life — then Believe. In. This. This is the opportunity to stand up and be counted. I will fight with my last breath to get us there together.”

Get ready for fireworks.

UPDATE (5.10am PT): Looks like Kroes really does mean business on the net neutrality front. Here’s a tweet from her right-hand man, Ryan Heath:

@gchampeau yes – Kroes is talking about guaranteeing all content on all devices, no anti-competitive discrimination #netneutrality—
Ryan Heath (@RyanHeathEU) May 30, 2013

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The news of the new EU industrial strategy came just a couple of days after the Geneva-headquartered, French-Italian manufacturer STMicroelectronics launched its own three-year project, worth €360 million ($463 million), aimed at creating a European microelectronics design ecosystem based around its fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) manufacturing process.

Some in the industry, such as chipmaker GlobalFoundries, have previously urged European authorities to back electronics manufacturing on the continent in order to counteract the vast influence of Asia and (to a lesser extent) the U.S. in this field.

Cheaper, faster, smarter

The European Commission’s strategy, announced on Thursday, is intended to make chips cheaper, faster and smarter. It will concentrate on shoring up three existing electronics clusters, namely those in Dresden (Germany), Eindhoven (Netherlands) and Leuven (Belgium), and Grenoble (France). Connections will also be made with other clusters such as that in Cambridge (UK), which is big in the wireless sector.

“I want to double our chip production to around 20 percent of global production,” Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement. “I want Europe to produce more chips in Europe than the United States produces domestically. It’s a realistic goal if we channel our investments properly.”

As per usual, this isn’t a simple public cash splurge. €5 billion in public funds – 30 percent from the EU with the rest coming from national and regional funds – will go to R&D, in order to help stimulate the sector. Overall, the Commission says, industry has indicated it will stump up €100 billion over the seven years: €15 billion in capital expenditure and €85 billion in operational costs.

The kind of electronics we’re talking about could be used in desktop and handheld computers, but the main thrust is for embedded systems and “internet of things” devices, from sensors and smart grids to new healthcare technologies. As Kroes said in a speech, “this isn’t about computers.”

Targeting these areas plays to Europe’s strengths. According to the Commission, Europe already pumps out half of global automotive electronics, 40 percent of electronics used in energy applications, and 35 percent of those used for industrial automation – this will be a reference to the output of companies such as Bosch, which are hugely active despite often being somewhat under-the-radar. Then we also have smaller manufacturers working in high-growth niches, such as health implants and sensors.

And jobs?

The purpose of all this is to make Europe less reliant on manufacturers outside the continent, but job creation is also a major factor. The Commission reckons the European electronics industry already employs 200,000 people directly and supports a further million jobs indirectly.

That said, the Commission also pointed out in its statement that demand for skilled workers in these fields is higher than supply – if this whole strategy is to work, the implication runs, Europe will need to attract more skilled workers. The statement talks of coordinating public efforts across Europe. Perhaps that will mean tweaking immigration rules: something the U.S. tech sector is also heavily vocal about these days.

Meanwhile, STMicro’s push – called, incredibly, “Pilot Lines for Advanced CMOS Enhanced by SOI in 2x nodes, Built in Europe” (Places2Be) – also takes place in the context of a wider European project, the nanoelectronics-focused ENIAC. In a briefing note accompanying Thursday’s announcement, the Commission insisted that ENIAC and ARTEMIS (another project focusing on embedded computing) had been a success, and that the new drive did not denote failure of those two schemes.

The Commission said the new joint undertaking would build on “lessons learnt” from ENIAC and ARTEMIS while providing a “simplified funding structure”.

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The 27 countries agreed on the rule change on Wednesday, according to the European Commission, which is behind the proposed revision of a 2003 directive on public sector information. If the European Parliament adds its stamp of approval, national governments will then transpose the changes into their laws sometime in the next 18 months or so.

According to Neelie Kroes, the digital agenda commissioner, the European Parliament will sign off on the change soon:

Breaking … #EU member states have agreed to updated #OpenData rules. Big culture change coming, #EP to sign off in coming weeks.

— Neelie Kroes (@NeelieKroesEU) April 10, 2013

The change will give developers, businesses and citizens the right to get their hands on public data at low cost or for free. They will also be able to use data from museums, libraries and archives for the first time. Public sector bodies will only be able to charge marginal costs for sharing their data, and will also have to be more transparent about their charges. They will also be encouraged to make their data available in machine-readable formats.

According to a webpage setting out the Commission’s hopes on the matter, the data in question will cover digital maps, weather data and road congestion data, as well as information on companies and court proceedings:

“Most of Public Sector Information raw data could be re-used or integrated into new products and services, which we use on a daily basis, such as car navigation systems, smartphone apps with weather forecasts, information services for companies integrating information from various sources, such as statistical data with economic forecasts, company register data and other publicly available information.”

Some European countries, such as the UK, already have established open data initiatives (and so, of course, does the U.S.).

Sources close to the negotiations tell me that agreement was reached on the basis that cultural institutions in particular could charge a bit more than originally planned for handing out their data. Some governments had apparently been hoping to be able to charge a lot more for their institutions’ data, but were convinced that they would get more money in the form of taxation from the businesses that would spring up around open data, the sources noted.

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The European Commission reckons  that 80 percent of high-speed network deployment costs relate to civil engineering, mostly digging up roads. For example, it may be that a road is being dug up anyway for the laying of new waterworks or electric cables, and it would be a no-brainer to lay some fiber in there at the same time – however, in many European countries that kind of coordination is not in place, and that’s what Kroes wants to fix.

Kroes maintains that this could take €40-60 billion ($51-77 billion) off the overall cost of deploying fiber-based broadband in Europe. She also wants rules that would ensure that newly-built or renovated buildings are equipped to receive fiber directly to the premises, and to mandate reasonably-priced open access conditions on infrastructure such as ducts and poles.

On the mobile front, Kroes says permits for new masts and antennas should be granted or refused within six months. Her office is painting all of these changes as cuts to red tape. While this interpretation may be debatable, as some of the changes would actually involve new rules, the overall result would at least be one of more efficient bureaucracy.

“Everyone deserves fast broadband. I want to burn the red tape that is stopping us for getting there,” Kroes said in a statement. “The European Commission wants to make it quicker and cheaper to get that broadband.”

Kroes’s Digital Agenda office intends to see, by 2020, that everyone in Europe has access to at least 30Mbps broadband, and that half the EU is able to surf at 100Mbps or more. She recently threw €50 million in the direction of “5G” research, so that mobile can carry more of the load in meeting those goals.

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Kroes has a 2020 goal for the “delivery” of 5G. That seems like a tall order, although the proliferation of IP-connected sensors in the internet of things may well necessitate a shift to even more efficient technologies than 4G.

“Rolling out today’s networks is important,” she said. “But what comes after? For the next global standard, and the next generation of technology, will Europe lead the world, or merely follow?”

The €50 million for 5G research includes €16 million for the METIS project we reported on in December. The goal here is to research faster, more spectrally efficient and more power-efficient mobile broadband than 4G – which in itself seeks to tick all those boxes, but which is not as Europe-led as 2G and even 3G were.

The EU’s investment is for the public part of an industry-wide public-private partnership – the companies involved, including some of the continent’s big carriers (Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Portugal Telecom) and infrastructure players (Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NSN), will have to stump up more, although they would be doing that anyway.

“Europe used to lead the world on wireless… European 5G is an unmissable opportunity to recapture the global technological lead,” Kroes said.

Of course, coming up with the technology is one thing, and deploying it is another. That’s where those complaints over EU spectrum harmonization come in – as Kroes puts it, the continent’s spectrum allocation map currently resembles “a bowl of spaghetti”, which is one reason why South Korea (population 50 million) has more 4G subscriptions than the whole of the EU (population 500 million). Kroes is really not happy that 17 of the 27 EU member states still don’t have 4G at all:

“We’ve already fixed a target to find a total of 1200MHz of spectrum for wireless broadband. But on average national governments have only awarded 65 percent of the spectrum we have already harmonised in the EU. So when Member States aren’t implementing legal commitments, we will use our full… powers.”

This should come as music to the carriers’ ears, as will her promise to cut down on the bureaucracy around infrastructure planning permits and inter-operator network sharing. Kroes has traditionally used her MWC speeches to lambast the carriers over issues such as roaming charges – this time she’s on their side:

“I am still determined to deliver broadband for all: and for that we must improve the market. So that it works for you in the industry, works for consumers, works for the economy. A European telecoms market more coherent, more integrated, more efficient; with lower investor risks and higher investor rewards.”

Spectrum allocations are a pain to fix, but they are fixable. As for 5G, €50 million isn’t a game-changing amount but it may be enough to stimulate research at this very early stage of the technology’s development. It’s true that Europe let itself fall behind on 4G, and that has real knock-on effects in terms of competitiveness. The EU would be smart to avoid making that mistake again.

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This formed the bulk of the €9.2 billion “digital part” of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), a part that got trimmed down to €1 billion in budget negotiations. That remaining billion will now go to a different subsection, to do with nailing down cross-border digital services such as e-procurement and e-invoicing. The whole ambition of using €7 billion in EU funding over the coming seven years to accelerate deployment of fibre-access broadband networks — which was in turn supposed to help businesses take up cloud services – just went bye-bye.

The cut could potentially hit rural areas and small towns the hardest. However, digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes, who must be bitterly disappointed as she’s worked on the CEF plans for years, issued a statement in which she said she was still shooting for the goals of having half of Europe surfing at more than 100 Mbps, and the rest on at least 30 Mbps, by 2020:

“It is clear that there can be no support for broadband with a pot of only €1bn, so this funding will be exclusively for digital services. Our 2020 fast broadband targets, agreed by everybody, may be harder to reach but I am not giving up on them. I will keep fighting, and I will support innovations that help roll-out fast broadband to underserved areas.”

Kroes went on to warn that member states would now need to rigidly adhere to her recently-announced 10-point regulatory plan for upgrading Europe’s broadband infrastructure, in order to hit targets:

“National governments will not achieve their own ambitions if they fail to offer this support. And their own support schemes will come under great pressure to serve areas where the market alone will not act.”

European telecoms providers had previously begged the continent’s leaders not to cut the broadband part of the CEF, arguing that such a move would harm the EU’s competitiveness. It should also be noted that the European Parliament still has to approve the budget before it can come into force.

UPDATE (Monday 11 Feb): It looks like there will be a serious fight over this budget in the European Parliament. From a statement issued by several blocs of parliamentarians:

“… We cannot accept a budget based solely on priorities of the past. We must maintain support for future-oriented policies, strengthening European competitiveness and research.”

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Thankfully others, such as the European Parliament, have different ideas on the matter. With perfect timing, on Tuesday the EP passed two resolutions – one on the ‘digital single market’ and the other on a ‘digital freedom strategy in EU foreign policy’ – that both backed net neutrality. The first of those two even called for new European legislation to protect the concept.

But that’s the European Parliament, which had already voted in favour of net neutrality just over a year ago. For those unfamiliar with the EU legislative process, the EP does not propose legislation: that’s the role of the unelected European Commission.

Reality bites

So where’s the Commission at on this subject?

The last thing we heard there came after a report by a group of European telecoms regulators, BEREC, which said in May that many fixed and mobile carriers are throttling P2P services, blocking VoIP and otherwise fiddling with customers’ services in ways that would be forbidden under net neutrality.

That elicited a somewhat woolly response from digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes, who said she favoured transparency about the limitations put on internet services, rather than any firm new laws. Or, as she put it, “consumers… need to know if they are getting champagne or lesser sparkling wine”.

I asked Kroes’s office if there was any response to the new European Parliament resolutions, but sadly there is not. However, if we’re in the mood for reading between the lines, there may be something to pull out of Kroes’s blog post today on the WCIT conference.

Kroes used the post to reiterate the EU’s opposition to the ‘takeover’ plans, but she also seemed to suggest something further. My emphasis:

“While we do not believe that Internet governance should be under the ambit of the ITRs [the rules being revised at the conference], this does not mean the EU wants to ‘set in stone’ all current governance practices. New trends in traffic volumes and new demand for assured quality of delivery, may lead to new solutions, but I am confident that our current European and international frameworks allow more nimble and appropriate commercial reactions than any international treaty. We also want to support developing countries to build capacity and infrastructures for the Internet.”

So, she doesn’t seem to think there’s a need to change EU law on net neutrality (sorry, Parliament), but she also doesn’t want an internationally binding treaty that prohibits the practice (sorry, ETNO).

Choice of words

With a European stance like that, I think it unlikely that ETNO will succeed in getting net neutrality banned. That said, I would dearly like to see the term – not the principle – done away with.

The term acts as a kind of straw man. Very few so-called net neutrality proponents actually want strict network neutrality. By any reasonable analysis of how things work, strict net neutrality is unworkable. All bits are not equal – it makes complete sense to prioritize VoIP traffic over email, for example, in order for it to flow in near-real-time.

What ‘net neutrality’ advocates actually want is a properly free online market, where telcos can’t block rival services such as VoIP just because they take away revenue, and where startups are not suppressed by having to pay telcos to have their traffic reach their customers. Perhaps ‘service neutrality’ might be a more accurate term, although it’s certainly less snappy. Suggestions would be welcome.

I’ll leave this with the wording in those resolutions approved by the European Parliament today:

81. Calls on the Commission to propose legislation to ensure net neutrality;

82. Points out that more competition and transparency with regard to traffic management and quality of service, as well as ease of switching, are among the minimum necessary conditions to ensure net neutrality; reiterates its support for an open internet where content and individual commercial services cannot be blocked; recalls the recent findings of the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC), and considers that additional measures are needed to ensure net neutrality;

83. Re-emphasises the potential challenges arising from departures from network neutrality, such as anti-competitive behaviour, blockage of innovation, restriction of freedom of expression, lack of consumer awareness and infringement of privacy, as well as the fact that lack of net neutrality hurts businesses, consumers and society as a whole.

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But that growth is uneven. Whilst the sector is taking off in the United States, Europe acknowledges “barriers” remain. So the European Commission has drawn up an “action plan” to improve prospects (release, blog). That plan aims, by 2020, to:

• specify the structure of patient record data that can be exchanged across borders
• improved patients’ digital health literacy
• develop a mobile health green paper by 2014
• improved the market conditions for ehealth entrepreneurs
• and more.

Europe will have its work cut out. Every day, I read — on sites like Mobi Health News, Connected Health and GigaOM – about new mobile and web health management products that let patients monitor ongoing conditions, many of which are now being taken on by local health providers in the States. In Europe, not so much…

European digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes

The US health system is considerably more privatised than many others around the world, meaning far greater flexibility and willingness amongst local care givers to offer new technological solutions, and a greater opportunity for technology providers to succeed.

Healthcare in European countries is mostly publicly-funded, and that could lock out the commercial groups that are now developing innovative ideas. The UK’s much-loved public National Health Service, for instance, is beginning to creak under its own weight. My family has experienced such poor care and been given so little information about their conditions that I would rather they had a far greater individual role in their cases.

Apps and services that empowered them with more information and sent that information to trusted providers could improve the situation. Yet government proposals for greater private provision are routinely baulked at by citizens.

Some governments spend up to 15 percent of their budget on healthcare. But this very dependence on public funding — during, what, for many nations, is a time of public austerity — could also be the reason Europe has even more to gain from ehealthcare than elsewhere, absolving hospitals and doctors surgeries of the need to provide face-to-face care all of the time.

European Commission VP and digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes, announcing her new action plan, calls it “a win-win for ministers of finance and the patient”:

“Fundamentally, those health systems were designed to deal with a model of acute care, based around stays in hospitals or institutions. That was fine for the 20^th century but cracks in the system are beginning to show.

“These days, many health conditions are long-term and degenerative. That trend will continue as our population gets older. People with that kind of condition don’t always need the same pattern of care.

“So we have to adapt, and digital technology is there to help us change. Whether it’s remote monitoring that lets you be cared for at home, robots to help around the house, or simply mobile apps that empower you to take control of your own healthcare.

“There is a leadership gap between ‘eHealth’ technology and patients. The sector has been hesitant to embrace the digital revolution, preferring to stick to traditional methods and models. Politicians have preferred not to upset a system that has worked well in the past.”

Kroes is a one-woman digital beacon for Europe, pulling forward the continent on so many issues, like cloud storage, mobile data rates and audio-visual policy.

But healthcare is a national, not a continental, policy issue. If Kroes’ ehealth plan is geared mostly toward smoothing out national barriers — as so many one-nation European initiatives are — then it will be underwhelming. But if it aims to eliminate the barriers to technology’s entry in healthcare, then citizens should cheer the plan.

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This is known as ‘refarming’ spectrum. Until today, the big example was the decision to allow 2G spectrum to be refarmed for both 3G and 4G. This is how EE managed to beat all the other UK operators to deploying 4G last week, while everyone else is still waiting for new spectrum to come up at auction next year – it already had tons of 1800MHz 2G spectrum, and was allowed to reuse it for LTE.

Now the same needs to be possible with spectrum around the 2GHz band that is, for now, only usable for UMTS/3G services. The Commission said on Monday that the move would free up an extra 120MHz for 4G, and that member states had to transpose the change into their national laws by 30 June 2014 at the latest.

How would that affect competitiveness? It would give the EU around 1000MHz of spectrum for 4G, or twice as much as that available to US carriers. It will also help the EU reach its broadband coverage goals, where everyone gets at least 30Mbps by 2020.

“This extra spectrum for 4G in Europe means we can better meet the changing and growing demand for broadband,” digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement. “I want to see member states acting swiftly to change existing licenses. We all win from faster wireless connections in Europe.”

The affected spectrum resides at 1920-1980MHz, paired with 2110-2170MHz. There is also some unpaired spectrum in the same region (at 1900-1920MHz and 2010-2025MHz) that is also set aside for 3G but is not being used by any operator in the EU – the Commission is considering opening that up to 4G too.

Not so fast

While Monday’s announcement will certainly lead to more 4G capacity, it is also likely to complicate matters for operators across Europe.

First off, 4G spectrum is no good if devices don’t use it for 4G. This can already be seen with handsets such as the iPhone 5, which will run LTE on 1800MHz but not on the other 4G bands that carriers have paid good money for – hence, in countries such as Germany, many operators do 4G but only one (Deutsche Telekom) can do it on the iPhone 5.

So this new option will have to be taken on board by manufacturers and operators alike. That will take time.

On the other hand, there should be plenty of time available for this to happen – not only will it take a couple of years for the reuse to become a reality, but no-one would be able to refarm their 3G spectrum for 4G until they’ve stopped using it for 3G. With voice over LTE still being worked out, that’s not going to happen any time soon.

There’s a small risk that most immediate effect of the decision will be felt in UMTS-toting countries, such as the UK, where 4G spectrum auctions are still to take place. Operators may calculate that they should be bidding less for new spectrum if they can reuse what they already own.

However, that’s unlikely to happen – refarming now would mean clearing 3G spectrum that is currently heavily used. It’s not an analogous situation to 2G, which is well on its way to the scrapheap due to massive uptake of 3G.

In other words, the Commission’s move will certainly have repercussions, but they’re unlikely to be felt for quite a few years yet.

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