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VIRTUALISATION ACCAN lobbies for "truly historic" reforms to telecoms legislation
VIRTUALISATION ACCAN lobbies for "truly historic" reforms to telecoms legislation | ACCAN lobbies for "truly historic" reforms to telecoms legislation |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Sunday, 11 October 2009 | |
  
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"Surprisingly, the Telecommunications Act 1997 defines neither the 'long-term interests of end-users' nor 'any-to-any connectivity', despite the former being a main object of that Act," ACCAN argues. "By leaving these definitions to the Trade Practices Act, the policy makers at the time clearly saw both overwhelmingly in competition terms, despite the Explanatory Memorandum to the Telecommunications Bill 1996 wishing for a wider meaning which it did not offer." In the TPA, the promotion of the LTIE is achieved through meeting the objectives of: promoting competition in markets for listed telecoms services; achieving any-to-any connectivity in relation to carriage [basic telecoms] services that involve communication between end-users; encouraging the economically efficient use of, and the economically efficient investment in the infrastructure by which listed services are supplied. ACCAN says that the concept of any-to-any connectivity used to define LTIE in the TPA is now too narrow. "Under the Trade Practices Act, end-users would appear to be only persons and not inanimate things such as file servers. Furthermore, to be relevant to promoting the long-term interests of end-users, these end-users must be connected by communicative rather than distributive services. Both these interpretations are far narrower than the original conception. "It is therefore plausible to conclude that any-to-any connectivity currently applies only to real time communication between two persons via fixed or mobile telephony and apparently not any communication involving data transmission. Internet-based services such as e-mail and the Web involving intermediate file servers and non-real time communication, as well as all pay television and video-on-demand services may not be covered by this definition." If this were not problem enough, ACCAN contends that the importance of any-to-any connectivity is now greatly diminished in regulatory decision-making; that it is being seen, at best as a proxy for competition. "The Productivity Commission, whose recommendations tend to be eventually followed by governments, was so dismissive of any-to-any connectivity that it sought its removal from the test of long-term interests of end-users," ACCAN claims. "Rulings by the ACCC now substantially ignore the sub-test of any-to-any connectivity." ACCAN recommends that the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2009 "be amended so that the objects of the Telecommunications Act and Part XIC of the Trade Practices Act reflect the achievement of any-to-any connectivity as a prime national goal and that the meaning of any-to-any connectivity should reflect the reality of modern communications."
This article first appeared in ExchangeDaily, iTWire's daily newsletter for telecommunications professionals. Register here for your free trial.
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