The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission announced plans to consider imposing a wholesale domestic mobile roaming service, in order to help improve coverage in rural areas.
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This would be the third time the ACCC has considered a declaration of mobile roaming, with inquiries held in 1998 and 2005 respectively.
“Consumers are increasingly relying on mobile services and the issue of coverage and a lack of choice in some regional areas is a particular issue that has been raised by a number of groups”, Mr Sims said.
In a statement immediately following the ACCC’s announcement, Telstra’s head of corporate affairs Tony Warren criticised the proposed changes.
Telstra Group Executive Corporate Affairs Tony Warren said the ACCC had again made a decision to review mobile roaming after two previous inquiries which found declaration was not required.
“Declaring mobile roaming would stop coverage being a differentiator in the Australian market and therefore, remove the key rationale for investment in regional Australia for all operators”.
The most likely ongoing beneficiaries of these arrangements would be regional and remote area users where network reception for a single network may be patchy but another network has decent coverage.
It could further receive preferential service activation, preferential fix of NBN broadband services for Telstra customers, and greater “insight” than its competitors into the NBN rollout, according to the Commission.
However, Sims says, “A lot has changed since 2005”. We do think it’s time we look at the issue again in detail, and examine some of these key matters, including consumer demand, network investment, and barriers to competition.
Vodafone Hutchison Australia chief strategy officer Dan Lloyd welcomed the inquiry, saying roaming is regulated in the other western countries with large land mass and areas of low population density, including the US, Canada and New Zealand without any evidence of negative impact on investment.
Sims noted that a particular area of concern for the ACCC “is whether consumers would, in fact, be disadvantaged if the incentives to invest in expanding the reach of mobile networks were reduced”.
Telstra said there was a lack of choice of operators for regional Australians because its competitors had not invested in those areas.
Telstra has been a major contributor to the Federal Government’s black spot program, which aims to build or upgrade 499 phone towers or base stations.
The first round of the government-funded initiative came with a $385 million price tag.
The paper calls for comment on a range of matters that may affect competition, the efficient operation of markets, and investment incentives over the next five years and beyond.
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The ACCC is also seeking to hear about the management of traffic across networks as data usage grows; whether non-fibre fixed-line services can meet data requirements in future; the level of substitution between fixed-line and mobile services, and whether this will lead to further industry consolidation; whether current interconnection arrangements between Telstra, Optus, and TPG, and smaller service providers is inhibiting more efficient practices or technologies; what kinds of arrangements exist in similar markets internationally; the impact of reducing the regulated price for domestic transmission capacity services; whether worldwide transmission routes will have enough capacity and redundancy; and whether data being held offshore by cloud providers is a concern.
