The Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Richard Alston, issued the direction to the ACCC to make rules "as soon as practicable" requiring Telstra to deliver information regarding the operations of its wholesale and resale business. The direction is designed to allow the market to identify any discriminatory access pricing or other anti-competitive conduct by Telstra.
In order for the Commission to understand Telstra's operational costs the telcommunications giant will give the commission current and historical cost accounts of services to which the Regulatory Accounting Framework (RAF) applies.
Telstra will also make public current and historical key financial statements on core interconnection services, which include PSTN interconnections (which allows competitors to connect to the Telstra network), local call resale and the unconditioned local loop services, which competitors can use to offer ADSL services.
The ACCC will use this data to publish an analysis that will allow the market to assess whether Telstra is engaging in anti-competitive 'price squeeze' behaviour. The commission will assume Telstra Retail pays the same price for core interconnect services as external customers.
A six monthly report on competition in the corporate segment of the market by the ACCC will assist in identifying any emerging or long-term trends of discrimination in the telecommunications market.
Telstra will also provide a comparison of how it supplies non-price services such as fault maintenance and availability and performance to itself and other telcos.
It's about time. Senator luddite oops Alston should have done this years ago. Have to wonder which pen pusher (Read Gov official) pointed this out to him. Any average citizen has known T(H)elstra have been ripping everyone off ever since the monopoly was broken up and so called competition was supposed to replace the sloth & greed of our major Telco.