Telstra faces court for blocking access to exchanges

Stuart Corner
Monday, 19 April 2010 11:19

IT Policy - Regulation

Hearings start today in the Federal Court in Melbourne in a case brought against Telstra last March by the ACCC alleging that Telstra had deliberately delayed the rollout of competing ADSL networks by claiming, falsely, that there was no room in its exchanges for competitors' DSLAMs or other equipment.

The ACCC is seeking declarations, pecuniary penalties and injunctions against Telstra. The legislation provides for fines of up to $10m for each breach of the legislation and the court action contains allegations of 30 separate instances in which competing carriers were blocked from accessing exchanges. Thus the potential exists for Telstra to face a $300m fine.

Competitors had been complaining about the problem since at least 2005 by the time the ACCC finally initiated legal action in March 2009 Telstra admitted that competitor access had been blocked when space was available but said these instances were due to administrative errors and shortcomings in its systems that, by the time the ACCC initiated legal action, had long since been addressed and it accused the ACCC of mounting a vendetta against Telstra.

When the legal action was initiated, Telstra's group managing director public policy and communications, David Quilty, said: "The ACCC is suing us for something we proactively and voluntarily reviewed and fixed a year ago. This case relates to a small number of inadvertent process issues. There was an issue and we fixed it - without the involvement of the ACCC. Since we fixed the problem a year ago, the ACCC has not once suggested it had problems with our new processes."

By that time the ACCC had a process in place to review and regularly publish a status of exchange capacity for competitors' infrastructure, and Quilty said: "To Telstra's knowledge, no issues have been identified by the ACCC under Telstra's current processes. Now, some nine months later, the ACCC has sued Telstra for a past failure to allow access to a handful of exchanges."

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