Summary

  • BEREC's register dates the cooperation memorandum to 2 October 2026. It provides for possible meetings, working groups and information exchanges, not a merger of regulatory powers.
  • The document does identify people and institutions to contact. What it leaves for later are the terms of particular activities, including their operational and financial arrangements.

On page four of the BEREC–Ofcom memorandum, the language of international cooperation gives way to something rather more practical: a name. Camilla Bustani, Ofcom's international director, is listed as a day-to-day contact. Across the channel, the corresponding address is the BEREC Office in Riga. A reader wondering who would pick up the conversation need not wait for another announcement.

That detail changes how the agreement should be judged. The problem is not that nobody has been assigned to keep the relationship moving. It is that a contact can arrange a discussion without being able to promise a common regulatory answer.

The memorandum, BoR (26) 153, appears in BEREC's register with a document and registration date of 2 October. Its signed text covers four broad subjects: connectivity, competition and open digital ecosystems, end users, and sustainable, secure and resilient infrastructure. Annual meetings, joint working groups, workshops and exchanges of questionnaires or working papers are among the possible ways to pursue them.

Those are useful tools for organisations facing related questions on different sides of a regulatory border. An operator serving both markets, however, still needs to know whose rules apply to each service. A questionnaire shared between officials does not itself reduce the forms that operator must complete, change an access obligation or settle an enforcement case. Those benefits would have to come from subsequent work and the appropriate decisions.

Each side keeps its bill

The memorandum is unusually plain about one mundane constraint: each participant pays its own implementation costs. Cooperation is not cost-free, but neither does this document allocate a joint pot of money. The terms of individual activities, including costs, operations and roles, are to be settled in later written arrangements that are also nonbinding.

It also distinguishes the people handling everyday business from those formally representing the institutions. Communications and notices go through BEREC's sitting chair and Ofcom's corporation secretary. Differences that cannot be resolved in direct negotiations go back to those representatives for a mutually agreed resolution. The agreement establishes a route for dealing with disagreement, not a higher authority that can impose an answer.

This is a modest form of cooperation, not necessarily an empty one. Ofcom says that international exchanges inform its regulation of the UK and its work on emerging developments. Learning how another authority defines a problem may be valuable well before the two agree on a remedy. Equally, a useful comparison can end in different decisions because the mandates, laws or markets differ.

The paper may travel farther than the decision

Information exchange has a boundary of its own. Documents intended to remain confidential must be marked before they are shared. The recipient is to protect them within the limits of its applicable laws and regulations. That is neither an automatic right for the public to see every working paper nor a blanket exemption from disclosure law.

The memorandum says the participants will communicate about accomplishments. It does not prescribe a public dashboard, a reporting interval or publication of every document. A later public analysis that explains what was learned would therefore be more informative than simply counting meetings. It could show whether a comparison changed an assumption, improved a method or informed a separate consultation. These are ways to assess the arrangement, not deliverables already promised by the text.

BEREC's 2026–2030 strategy places such exchanges within a wider history of international cooperation. The new memorandum should not be mistaken for the first time regulators have spoken across borders. Nor does it make BEREC's participation an official EU position or give Ofcom a vote: both sides retain their existing mandates.

Either participant can end the arrangement with at least 30 days' written notice. For now, its most concrete contribution is a framework for asking questions and directing them to the right desks. Whether operators or their customers benefit will depend on what those desks do with the answers—not on whether the answers happen to match.

Updated 25 October 2026: this article now identifies the memorandum's existing focal points and distinguishes its registration date from separately dated signatures. It also separates the document's communication provisions from proposals for wider public reporting.