The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has issued the final version of the Telecommunications Transmission Cost Model. The model has been designed with the flexibility to calculate cost-based pricing for backhaul on any land based (terrestrial) or under sea (submarine) telecommunications transmission route in Australia.
"Transmission capacity services are a critical input to the supply of broadband services to end-users across Australia and with increased numbers of fixed and wireless networks, the pricing of these services will become increasingly important," ACCC Chairman, Mr Graeme Samuel, said today.
The price of backhaul on routes without effective competition has often been cited by access seekers as a key obstacle to the roll-out of high-speed broadband into regional and rural Australia.
The ACCC will use this model to assess the costs of supplying transmission services in different regions of Australia as it carries out its regulation of transmission services and arbitration of access disputes.
Transmission or backhaul costing is highly route dependent and thus does not easily lend itself to simple pricing structures or models. For example, the backhaul route to Tasmania has a unique and significant submarine component as it crosses Bass Strait. The model has been developed over a period of time to take this complexity into account to provide cost-based pricing for individual routes.
Users of the model will need to supply the equipment cost and dimensioning data for the particular transmission route they seek to assess. The model is supplied with full user documentation and can be freely downloaded from the ACCC website.
The ACCC is particularly interested in hearing from users of the model in relation to the appropriate cost and dimensioning parameters to set in the model for each route of interest to them. The ACCC intends to prepare indicative prices for the transmission service across a variety of routes and commence a short consultation process.