The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission today issued its twentieth report under the enhanced accounting separation regime for Telstra. These reports concern whether systematic discrimination could be occurring in the price or service quality offered to Telstra retail and wholesale customers. They are not intended to detect all forms of potentially anti-competitive conduct.
The latest report, which presents data for the quarter ending 30 June 2008, includes:
- an imputation analysis which tests whether sufficient margins likely exist to allow efficient firms that acquire three core* access services from Telstra to compete against Telstra in the retail market; and
- key performance indicators concerning Telstra's service levels when connecting or repairing faults on wholesale and retail fixed-line telephony and ADSL services.
In the current quarter, there was a slight tightening of the imputed margin for competitors using Telstra's resale access services, while margins improved slightly for competitors using the unconditioned local loop service.
The level of service supplied to wholesale customers improved during the quarter. However service levels for new wholesale connections requiring work at the customer's premises – which was a matter discussed in the report for the March 2008 quarter – still need to improve further to bring them into line with retail service levels.
The report will be available on the ACCC website.
*The three core access services are the local carriage service, the PSTN originating and terminating access service, and the unconditioned local loop services (ULLS). The ULLS allow a competitor to lease the use of a customer's line to supply any combination of access, voice, ADSL or other data services.