a determination approved by Anacom on 24 June 2005 and yesterday communicated on its website indicates that PT Comunicações must introduce two changes to its wholesale ADSL offer within 10 working days. The regulator wants the process of migrating customers between ISPs to be faster and wants PT Comunicações to apply the new prices set in May to its offer.
The decision of the communications market regulator indicates that the contract termination process for changing ADSL service provider must be changed. The customer’s migration process must be initiated as soon as the order is received from the operator to which the customer wishes to migrate, placing on the side of the ISPs that the customer has won the responsibility to proceed with the process.
This change should speed up the procedures for changing ADSL operator, which currently can take up to 3 months, since previously it was the ISP that stopped the service that had to communicate the change, letting the process drag to keep the customer for some more time. . The amendment proposed by Anacom is still subject to a prior hearing by interested parties, who must comment within 10 days.
New ATM aggregation costs
In a separate decision, although from the same date, Anacom also indicates that the new ATM aggregation costs that came into force on 19 May must be introduced in the wholesale offer of PT Comunicações within 10 days. In practice, this decision affects ISPs that have ATM access, regardless of the debit class, who now pay 7.05 euros per month for local access.
Anacom also determines that the change of speed for the classes of 2, 4 and 8 Mbps should remain free for a period of 6 months, guaranteeing the gradual change that is being carried out by the operators of ADSL services, also due to the entry into on May 19 of the new wholesale offer of PT Comunicações.
Significant market power
The regulator also confirmed the existence of significant market power on the part of the PT Group in the wholesale provision of broadband access, an understanding that was already in the document submitted to public consultation at the end of last year. Pt Group companies are thus subject to several obligations, namely access to various points in the network; transparency in the publication of information, including reference proposals; non-discrimination in the offer of access and interconnection and control of prices and costs, among others.
In the same decision, Anacom argues that there is no justification for the imposition of new access obligations, namely to the cable network, although maintaining the parallelism obligations between the offers launched by the PT group on the cable network and those of the wholesale ADSL network (see Related News).
Related News:
2005-06-29 – Anacom says that competition in the broadband market does not require the opening of the cable
2005-05-10 – Regulator approves PT’s wholesale offer for debit categories above 1 Mb
2005-04-20 – PT quadruples the speed of Internet services and launches offers of 4 and 8 Mb
