Thursday, May 12, 2005, ANRC submitted to public consultation, on its website, the Draft Decision of the President of the National Regulatory Authority for Communications regarding the imposition of obligations on the provider with significant power on the specific relevant retail markets.
By the end of 2004, upon the identification of 10 specific relevant retail markets, ANRC designated Romtelecom as a provider with significant power on 9 of the 10 markets, while specific obligations would further be imposed on this provider, according to the legal provisions. For the 10th market, the market of calls at a fixed location to public mobile telephone networks for legal persons, ANRC conducted an additional market analysis following which it submitted to public consultation, until May 9, 2005, the draft decision designating S.C. Romtelecom S.A. as a provider with significant power on this market.
By submitting this draft decision to public consultation, ANRC aims to consult the profile industry for the purpose of imposing remedies on the specific retail markets, so as to prevent breach of the end-users’ rights or hindrance of the competition development. Thus, ANRC proposes the imposition on the provider with significant market power of the following obligations:
– the obligation to allow its subscribers to use the services of any other provider of publicly available telephony services with which an interconnection agreement has been concluded, by means of the carrier selection or pre-selection procedure;
– the interdiction for the provider to condition the provision of a certain service by the end-users’ consent to use additional services, apart from the requested service;
– the interdiction for the provider to charge tariffs below the costs or excessively high tariffs in relation to the costs involved in the provision of the respective services (cost-orientation of retail tariffs).
Carrier pre-selection allows the subscribers of the provider with significant power on the retail market to choose that all or certain categories of calls be carried by another service provider, pre-selected (upon concluding a dedicated contract) by the subscriber without dialling an individual carrier selection code for each call. In order to encourage competition on the market, ANRC will require Romtelecom that the carrier pre-selection procedure be operational no later than mid-2006.
In order to prevent Romtelecom from obliging its subscribers to purchase additional services (conditioning the provision of access services by the purchase of credit minutes), ANRC imposed on this provider the obligation to offer the end-users at least one type of subscription without credit or minutes included, so that the interested end-users could buy access services from Romtelecom while buying calls from alternative providers.
For monitoring Romtelecom’s compliance with the tariff cost-orientation obligation, ANRC proposes that this company be imposed the obligation to implement a cost-distribution accounting system for each of the services provided on the specific relevant retail markets. Among the services provided on the specific relevant retail markets, whose distribution will be accounted in the separate financial statements, we count: residential/corporate subscriptions, local/distance calls within the operator’s network, local/distance calls to other public fixed networks, dial-up and ISDN services for Internet access, international calls (classified according to call destination), calls to public mobile networks. A detailed report on these services will be included as well in the statutory annual financial statement for 2004 of Romtelecom and must be transmitted to ANRC within at most 4 months from the date of publishing the annual financial statements regulated by the financial-accounting legislation.
This draft decision of ANRC is available on the website of authority. All interested persons are invited to send their comments and suggestions by June 13, 2005. Comments and suggestions may be submitted by mail to the ANRC headquarters: 14 Libertatii Blvd., 5th District, Bucharest, as well as directly to the ANRC registration office or to the territorial offices of ANRC. Comments may be sent also by fax at: +40 21 307 54 02 or by e-mail at: consultare@anrc.ro