An earlier dipolar treatment, including retardation and predicting an anisotropic behavior for a periodic cermet, has been applied to a suitable model. This has pointed out the need for carefully handling the concept of depolarizing field in the presence of retarded dipole‐dipole interactions. Calculations have been performed to carry out the effective permittivity tensor of the given model. The results show a certain amount of anisotropy but do not agree with a very recent experiment. Possible implications are briefly discussed.