Commerce Commission Conference

I’m in a Commerce Commission conference on the TelstraClear Wholesale Bitstream Service Application for the next two days. Hence blogging may be reduced in volume.

The draft determination was regarded by InternetNZ as very beneficial to ISPs and ultimately users, and we are encouraging the Commissioners to not water down the draft determination (as they did with local loop unbundling).

Telecom has around a dozen lawyers and economists here. TelstraClear has a few less while InternetNZ has one lawyer, one geek and myself 🙂

The main issues for the conference are:

* Calculating the wholesale bitstream access price
* Technical issues (mainly being whether the service should be unconstrained as to download speed)
* Whether there should be a single price for residential and business access prices
* Whether the regulated service should be made available nationally or only in areas where competition is deemed not to exist
* Operational support systems issues

I’ll probably post the odd update during the two days, but try not to bore people too much. It is pretty dry and technical, but a good outcome is important.

UPDATE: A minor victory. Our lawyer has just had the Comission rule out of order several pages of presentations that Telecom tried to present, as this was not material covered in the earlier submisisons.