According to industry sources, the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) rubber-stamped the final version of the guidelines late Wednesday. The Authority today said it would make an announcement regarding the guidelines early next week.
Acting as a facilitator, the ACA began the six-month process of developing the guidelines in January 2002. The ACA released a draft form of the guidelines in mid-April, inviting the public and interested parties to make submissions on the charter.
During the public consultation process, which included public information sessions delivered in Melbourne and Sydney, the regulator received comments, advice and criticism of its guidelines from a broad cross-section of industry and community groups.
Telecommunications carriers, network resellers, industry groups, consumer and community groups, ISPs, and privacy advocates, converged to decide how best to inform consumers about Internet service offerings.
Among the more hotly contested issues before the ACA were price and performance.
The draft version of the guideline included seven indicators of performance, including the ratio of customers to individual input connections for dial-up services, the ratio of delivery speed between peak and off-peak hours, an ISP's average bandwidth utilisation during the peak periods, and an indication of the number of hours that an ISP's modems are utilised over weekdays, in recent periods.
Telstra submitted a recommendation that the four performance indicators be dropped from the final version of the guideline, leaving only three of the original seven.
Some criticised the establishment of the guidelines altogether.
Former iPrimus Telecommunications general manager, Ash Chopra, agreed with sentiments that the guidelines would simply become another marketing tool while being too unsound technically to provide consumers with adequate information.
"There is much room for interpretation and definition of the data to be provided, and much of the data is meaningless without consideration of the timeliness of updates," Chopra told ZDNet Australia.
"This will only serve to weaken the intended purpose of the guidelines."
Privacy advocates also made submissions. Australian Privacy Charter Council convenor, Nigel Waters, recommended that the guideline make ISP privacy obligations more explicit in the guideline.
