Summary

  • On 7 October 2026, Nkom repealed in full its 2017 designation of mobile voice termination providers with significant market power and the special obligations attached to that designation. The repeal took effect the same day.
  • The common EEA maximum price still applies to every Norwegian provider of the service. For calls originating inside the EEA, Norway's 2026 ceiling is 2.34 øre per minute; the underlying European ceiling is 0.2 eurocent per minute.

The rulebook leaves; the meter stays

When a caller on one network reaches a phone on another, the receiving network completes the call. That last step is mobile voice termination. The caller's network may pay the receiving network for it. It is a wholesale input, hidden inside retail offers but quite capable of making a small provider's cost base miserable if the receiving side can set its own price.

Nkom's 7 October decision takes the 2017 Norwegian decision off the books in its entirety: the significant-market-power designations and their special obligations end together. Nkom did not leave a national price vacuum. Its current market explanation says the EEA-wide maximum continues to bind all Norwegian mobile voice termination providers, whether or not anyone carries a special market-power label.

That distinction is the story. The European ceiling is 0.2 eurocent a minute. Norway's conversion sets the maximum for EEA-originated calls at 2.34 øre a minute from 1 January 2026. The krone amount is reset every 1 January using the average of European Central Bank rates published on 1 September, 1 October and 1 November. A procurement team comparing voice routes therefore needs the applicable year's Norwegian cap, not a memory of an old operator-specific order. This ceiling concerns the wholesale act of finishing a call; it is neither a consumer tariff nor a roaming price.

The market analysis attached to the repeal contains a useful tension. Nkom still finds high and durable entry barriers: a rival cannot simply build a substitute endpoint for someone else's subscriber. Yet it finds that the second test for special advance regulation is not met, chiefly because the shared price ceiling already handles the central risk of excessive termination charges. The regulator stops there rather than pretending that the first barrier disappeared.

The surviving cap standardises the headline minute price; the repeal removes a separate Norwegian layer of duties. Those are different pieces of a wholesale bargain. Operators buying termination should now keep the EEA-origin condition, annual NOK conversion and any actual non-price interconnection terms in separate columns. A dispute over access or contract handling would need its own facts; the price ceiling alone supplies no answer to every operational question.

The decision was effective on 7 October. Its text allows an appeal within three weeks of receipt and permits the ministry to suspend implementation during an appeal. An official stay would change the date on which the old obligations cease to operate. Until such a document exists, the operative record is a retired special rulebook and a very much employed price cap.

Sources