A decade-old rule meets a new technology
The EU's Open Internet Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2015/2120, was written for a world of best-effort broadband and the occasional managed VoIP service. It was not written with 5G network slicing in mind — the ability to carve a single physical mobile network into multiple virtual sub-networks, each tuned for a different latency, jitter, or throughput profile. On June 2-3, 2026, BEREC's Board of Regulators approved a draft Further Guidance on 5G Network Slicing, to be issued as an annex to its existing Open Internet Guidelines, and opened it for public consultation running to August 6, 2026. The document does not create new law. It tells operators, in concrete scenario form, how to self-assess whether a sliced service is lawful internet access, a lawful "specialised service," or neither.
What the guidance actually does
Under the 2015 Regulation, a specialised service is one "optimised for specific content, applications or services" where that optimisation is objectively necessary to meet a quality requirement — BEREC's existing examples include VoLTE calling, linear IPTV, and remote-surgery connectivity, per its specialised-services guidance. Two conditions gate the exemption: the optimisation must be necessary (not achievable over ordinary best-effort access), and it must not come at the expense of general internet access capacity. The new annex walks through generic slicing use cases — network slices for connected-vehicle telemetry, industrial IoT, or emergency services — and gives BEREC's preliminary read on which side of that line each falls on. As Omdia's analysis of the draft put it, slicing is compliant "if applied based on application needs and the public internet is unaffected." That is not a new standard; it is the 2015 standard applied to 2026 network architecture.
The case for caution, stated fairly
Digital-rights groups are right to watch this closely, and their objection deserves a full hearing rather than a dismissal. Epicenter.works, in its response to BEREC's February 2026 call for input, has argued that earlier draft language weakening how "detriment to other networks" is assessed could let operators degrade capacity for competitors' services while nominally protecting only their own best-effort tier — and flagged, per its critique of the 2022 guidelines, that most zero-rating-style commercial arrangements are closed to non-partner services, which is precisely the kind of gatekeeping net neutrality was designed to prevent. If "specialised service" self-assessment becomes a rubber stamp applied inconsistently by 27 different national regulators, the practical effect could be a two-tier mobile internet where slice capacity gets allocated to whoever has a commercial deal with the carrier, not whoever the end user chooses. That is a real risk, not a hypothetical one, and it is the correct question for a consultation to interrogate.
Why the guidance is still the right move
But the alternative to guidance is not a stronger rule — it is prolonged uncertainty, which has its own cost. Telecom operators and equipment vendors have spent years asking BEREC and the European Commission for exactly this kind of clarity, and CCIA's submission to the call for input noted that the existing framework already supplies workable criteria — the missing piece was consistent interpretation, not new substantive limits. Without a shared reference annex, each of the EU's national regulatory authorities (NRAs) has been left to apply the necessity-and-non-degradation test to novel slicing architectures independently, which is a recipe for the same service being approved in Germany and blocked in Portugal. That divergence is worse for both innovation and enforceability than a single, carefully scoped annex that all 27 NRAs can point to. Crucially, BEREC has not proposed loosening the two substantive tests themselves — necessity and non-degradation remain intact; the annex only standardizes how they get applied to slicing.
What determines whether this works
The guidance's success will not be decided by its text but by enforcement. BEREC's own framing — that the current Regulation "remains fit for purpose" — is only true if NRAs actually measure internet-access-service quality with and without specialised slices running, as the existing guidelines require, rather than accepting operator self-assessments at face value. The August 6 consultation deadline is the last point at which civil society, competing service providers, and equipment vendors can push BEREC to tighten the audit mechanism — for instance, by requiring published, comparable QoS baselines per NRA — before the annex is finalised. Get that oversight right, and the guidance does what good technology-neutral regulation should: let a new architecture ship without forcing every operator to relitigate a decade-old legal question from scratch. Get it wrong, and the annex becomes the loophole its critics fear.