Looking ahead

With the introduction of 5G, people and organisations in the Netherlands will have even more options when it comes to using services and applications via mobile internet. In the future, however, cybercriminals will continue to be inventive and seize upon new technologies in order to find new ways of committing fraud. This means that safeguarding privacy and security will be even more relevant than it is today. This is also reflected in the news legislation and regulations from the European and Dutch governments. In that regard, the EECC (European Electronic Communications Code), which is expected to be implemented later this year as part of the Dutch Telecommunications Act and the ePrivacy Regulation, is set to have a major impact on our organisation with regard to the construction and availability of our networks, with regard to access obligations and with regard to the privacy and security of our customers.

As far as our chain of suppliers is concerned, we predict that in the next few years, a large number of our suppliers will register with Ecovadis. In 2022, we aim to have 75% of our top 500 suppliers on board. In that same year, we aim to initiate a dialogue with our suppliers, based on their Ecovadis rating. We will use that dialogue as a means of jointly drawing up an audit to identify where there is scope for improvement and how they can increase their impact and therefore indirectly increase our impact too. We will also continue that dialogue in 2023 and 2024. From 2023 onwards, we will work in close collaboration with our internal stakeholders to carry out a study into alternatives for suppliers who are fundamentally performing poorly in the field of sustainability.

At the beginning of 2020, we made a cautious start to recording environmental and diversity criteria in our tendering process. In the next few years, we intend do this much more frequently, with the aim of making this an integral part of all of our tenders by the end of 2022.