Commerce Commission publishes three decisions that implement Telco Act amendments

The Commerce Commission today released three decisions which follow recent amendments to the Telecommunications Act. The amendments require the Commission to review some of the current standard terms determinations (STDs) ahead of the structural separation of Telecom into Chorus and Telecom Retail.

The first decision makes more than 400 substantive amendments to six STDs which are necessary as a consequence of the structural separation of Telecom and the legislative amendments.

The second decision sets the price and non-price terms for a new service, the Unbundled Copper Low Frequency Voice Service (UCLFS), created by the Amendment Act and which is available from separation day. The UCLFS enables telecommunications companies to provide a voice service to their customers using the low frequency band in Telecom’s copper local loop network.

The third decision is a review of the unbundled copper local loop (UCLL), unbundled bitstream access (UBA) and sub-loop (SLU) services STDs to set geographically averaged prices for these services. The Commission has set these geographically averaged prices by undertaking a simple averaging of the existing different urban and non urban UCLL prices, and flowing that averaged price through to UBA and SLU prices.

In this third decision, the Commission updated the Naked UBA price to ensure price relativity between UCLL and UBA. The new UBA prices will apply for new UBA customers from separation day; existing customers will continue to receive the UBA service at the current price. In contrast, the new prices for UCLL and SLU will apply from three years after Telecom’s structural separation. Separation day is expected to be 30 November 2011.

The UCLL service allows telecommunications companies to use Telecom’s copper network between the exchange and the customer’s premises to provide their own broadband service. The UCLF Service allows telecommunications companies to use the low frequency of Telecom’s copper loop to deliver voice services without having to replicate the local loop.

You can view the decisions on the Commission’s website.
Consequential changes review: www.comcom.govt.nz/consequential-changes-review-of-stds
UCLFS service STD: www.comcom.govt.nz/chorus-unbundled-copper-low-frequency-service-std
UCLL averaging STD: www.comcom.govt.nz/review-to-average-ucll-sub-loop-ucll-and-uba-prices