Review of Access Pricing Principles for Fixed Line Services
Given the legislative changes under the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Safeguards)Act 2010, the ACCC suspended the review of the access pricing principles for fixed line services.
The ACCC continued to analyse submissions and new information received in response to the review of the access pricing principles.
The ACCC issued Interim Access Determinations for the fixed line services in early 2011, covering price and non-price terms. The information received during the review were used to calculate prices for the Interim Access Determinations.
On 17 September 2010, the ACCC released a draft report setting out its proposed approach to access pricing that would apply to the declared fixed line services from January 2011. These legacy services make up the key wholesale and access services delivered over Telstra’s copper network and include the: unconditioned local loop service (ULLS); wholesale line rental (WLR); line sharing service (LSS); public switched telephone network originating access (PSTN OA); public switched telephone network terminating access (PSTN TA); and local carriage service (LCS).
The release of the draft report followed a period of industry consultation that commenced when the ACCC released a Discussion Paper on 3 December 2009.
Submissions to the draft report were due by 22 October 2010.
Parties that wish to gain access to an unredacted version of the draft report were required to provide a confidentiality undertaking in favour of Telstra Corporation Limited. Details of the confidentiality arrangements are outlined below.
New pricing model
In early 2010 the ACCC engaged a consultant to develop a new pricing model to calculate access prices for fixed line telecommunications services. The ACCC released a redacted version of the new pricing model. The information redacted from the new pricing model was of the same nature as the information that was marked as commercial in confidence in the draft report. The confidential information in the model was replaced with dummy values highlighted in yellow.
Parties that wish to gain access to an unredacted version of the new pricing model were required to provide a confidentiality undertaking in favour of Telstra Corporation Limited. Details of the confidentiality arrangements are outlined below.
The ACCC reached an agreement with Telstra on an appropriate confidentiality regime. Under the regime, parties who wish to gain access to the confidential information were required to provide confidentiality undertakings in favour of Telstra Corporation Limited.
A template of the confidentiality undertaking is provided below. Signed undertakings are to provided directly to Telstra's legal counsel, Mr Sandy Flecknoe-Brown (sandy.flecknoe-brown@team.telstra.com). Mr Flecknoe-Brown can be contacted on 02 8576 2745 for inquiries.
Over the past decade the ACCC has generally been guided by its 1997 document Access Pricing Principles—Telecommunications: a guide (1997 Access Pricing Principles) when determining pricing principles and indicative prices for the declared fixed line services. More recently, the ACCC signalled its intention to review these guidelines as there has been increasing industry agreement that the pricing approach outlined in the 1997 Access Pricing Principles was no longer the most appropriate method for setting access prices.
On 3 December 2009, the ACCC released a discussion paper reviewing the 1997 Access Pricing Principles. A copy of the discussion paper is available below.
The review was undertaken in recognition of the evolution of the telecommunications sector since 1997.
Submissions to the discussion paper were due by 26 February 2010.
