Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The ACCC has rejected a move by Telstra that would have denied Optus the ability to offer standard telephone services on the Telstra network in areas served by the Optus hybrid fibre co-axial network.
Had Telstra been successful, Optus would have been forced to use the HFC network to provide a fixed line telephone service. Telstra has long argued that Optus' preference for using wholesale Telstra services rather than its HFC network is an indication that the ACCC has forced it to set wholesale prices tha are too low, meaning it is cheaper for Optus to do use wholesale Telstra services than to invest in enabling its own HFC network to support telephony.
In December 2007 Telstra lodged an application with the ACCC seeking exemptions from the standard access obligations for any of its services that would have enabled Optus to offer a telephone service - the unconditioned local loop service, line sharing service, local carriage service, wholesale line rental service and PSTN originating access service - to any customer premises within 75 metres of Optus' HFC network in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
Rollout of the network in the mid 1990s was Optus grand plan to compete with Telstra at an infrastructure level. The network was designed to carry both telephony and pay TV and Optus hoped it would break Telstra's monopoly, but Telstra simply followed Optus with is own network and, in partnership with News Corporation and Packer's Publishing and Broadcasting, set up Foxtel, secured better content and dominated the pay TV market.
Optus' initial plans to offer telephony services were beset by technical difficulties that culminated in it suing its first technology supplier, ADC and switching to and alternative, Motorola.
The ACCC decided that the singling out of a particular competitor would represent a discriminatory access policy which would be likely to discourage investment in the telecommunications industry, and that Telstra's strong position in the pay TV market, through its interest in Foxtel, would be likely to limit any possible competitive benefits from granting the exemption.
ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel said: "This acts to the detriment of consumers of other services, such as broadband and telephony, and impacts on the efficiency of further investment in the Optus HFC network."
David Bass
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