ACCC refuse to regulate access from Telstra's 'legacy' ISDN & DDAS services

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 18 June 2009 13:33

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

The ACCC has brushed aside claims from Optus, Primus and other carriers that there are no technically comparable substitutes to ISDN and the Digital Data Access Services in regional and rural areas and has removed these from the list of 'declared' services, giving Telstra the freedom to raise prices, or to discontinue supply if it so chooses.

ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) is a 20 year old retail service for the delivery of digital data over the copper telephone access network. DDAS is a wholesale service that enables service providers to deliver data services to retail customers over Telstra copper.

Regulated access (Declaration) of these services expired in metropolitan areas in 2006, but the ACCC has until now maintained declaration in regional areas after accepting arguments from Telstra's competitors that other options such as ADSL and xDSL variants do not provide comparable substitutes in particular for the delivery of videoconferencing services.

It reviewed declaration in 2008 and, reluctantly, agreed to a one year extension. In this year's review Telstra's competitors maintained the same arguments, but the ACCC was not to be swayed this time.

Acting Chairman Peter Kell said that, in balancing the objectives of regulation, the ACCC was not satisfied that continued declaration of these services would be in the long term interests of end users. "The ACCC considers that removing regulated access will encourage the general move toward other, better, technologies such as xDSL and wholesale transmission. This will occur through businesses taking up the new technologies and greater investment in more efficient and cost effective services."

The ACCC issued a discussion paper in March in preparation for making a decision on whether to further extend declaration beyond 30 June 2009. Then, as in 2008, of the respondents only Telstra was in favour of ending declaration, arguing that these were legacy services, were declining in popularity and that adequate more modern substitutes existed. The other telcos maintained that this was not the case and called for extensions of two and three years. In particular they argued that DSL does not provide a cost-effective substitute to ISDN for videoconferencing.

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