Telco issues

A couple of related issues, which may be of interest.

Computer World has an article on the review currently happening of the Telecommunications Act. A hard issue to make sexy, but an important one.

Also last week the Commerce Commission made a ruling on whether ISPs have to fund TSO (used to be Kiwishare) obligations. Because Telecom are “burdened” with the local loop monopoly, they get to invoice out to other telcos a proportion of the money they lose on unprofitable (generally very rural) residential customers. No allowance is made for the 1 million+ profitable customers incidentially so telcos such as Vodafone and Telstra-Clear have to pay Telecom several million dollars to cover their market share proportion of the loss making customers.

Now some of these telcos were keen to have all ISPs have to contribute to the cost also. This would have led to ISPs having to also pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more, to Telecom.

Luckily the Commerce Commission has decided that the cost should only be levied on those with inter-connect agreements with Telecom.

The INZ press release on the issue is below:

PRESS RELEASE: INTERNETNZ
29 March 2005

InternetNZ welcomes Thursday