Telecommunications Act: Commission clarifies interaction between commercial and regulated bitstream services
Published10 Sep 2004
The Commission has today released a statement on the interaction between the regulated bitstream service under the Telecommunications Act, and Telecom's own commercial bitstream service.
Issued 10 September 2004
The Commission has today released a statement on the interaction between the regulated bitstream service under the Telecommunications Act, and Telecom's own commercial bitstream service.
The Commission took this step in response to continuing uncertainty within the industry about the effect of reaching a commercial agreement with Telecom about its commercial UBS service. The Commission continues to receive inquiries about whether such agreements would affect the ability of parties to seek access to the regulated bitstream services under the Telecommunications Act.
The Commission has clarified that:
an access seeker entering into a commercial agreement with Telecom for a UBS service variant will not be able to apply for a regulatory service with the same characteristics as Telecom's service;
a bitstream service with a different downstream speed from Telecom's current UBS service would not be regarded as having the same characteristics as the Telecom service; and
if there is no commercial agreement between Telecom and an access seeker for a particular bitstream service, the access seeker has the option of applying to the Commission to set any of the terms, price or non-price, for that service.
On 22 December 2003, the Commission releases its final report on the investigation into unbundling the local loop network and the fixed public data network. As part of its report, the Commission recommended that access to an asymmetric DSL bitstream service, suitable for the residential and SME broadband market, should be a regulated services under the Telecommunications Act 2001. The Commission also recommended that access to a backhaul transmission service be regulated to complement the bitstream service.
On 19 May 2004, the Minister of Communications accepted the Commission's recommendations, subject to some minor alterations which needed to be made to the wording of the bitstream service description to be incorporated within Schedule 1 of the Act. On 24 June 2004, the Commission provided the Minister with an updated version of the bitstream service description.
On 13 July 2004, the Minister formally accepted the Commission's recommendations to designate both the unbundled bitstream service and related backhaul transmission service under the Act.
On 2 August 2004, the Telecommunications Act 2001 Schedule 1 was amended by Order in Council, to include the bitstream and bitstream backhaul services as designated services under the Act. The order comes into force on 2 September 2004. A copy of the service description is available at Overview of the Standard Terms Determination Process
Section 22 of the Telecommunications Act states:
22 When application may not be made
Despite section 20, no person may apply for a determination if -
(a) the persons who would otherwise be parties to the determination have an agreement for the supply of the service for part or all of the specified period of time; or
(b) those persons have agreed not to have any term for the supply of the service determined by the Commission; or
(c) that person has not made reasonable attempts to negotiate the terms of supply of the service with the person who would otherwise be a party to the determination; or
(d) the applicable conditions in relation to the service (if any) have not been met
