USTR Highlights Access Problems, Rate Barriers, Lack of Transparency
The U.S. Trade Representatives urged trading partners to remove access barriers to supplier networks, and provide reasonable termination rates and more transparency in satellite rules, said its annual review of the operation and effectiveness of telecom trade agreements. The 2011 Section 1377 Review noted increases in fixed and mobile call termination rates in Tonga, Ghana and Jamaica; access challenge to major supplier networks in Chile, Germany, India and Mexico; and licensing, transparency and regulatory requirement issues in China, Costa Rica and India.
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Competitive telecommunications carriers continued to acknowledge market access barriers in Germany due to restrictions on access to incumbent operator Deutsche Telekom’s network, the USTR said. It said carriers have been asking for access to IP-Multicast, a wholesale service that would enable IPTV distribution to compete with DT’s IPTV service. DT had claimed it didn’t have a standard multicast platform to offer to competitors. Commenters claimed the situation has changed now that DT has over 1 million subscribers, and that it should therefore be required to provide a standard offer for the service. The USTR is investigating, a spokesman said. Meanwhile, there are no obvious trade issues at stake regarding AT&T’s plan to buy T-Mobile, since the acquirer is a U.S. company, he said.
U.S. companies continued to note difficulties offering satellite capacity to customers in China and India due to a lack of transparency in the rules governing the provision of satellite capacity in the countries, the USTR review said. The requirement to sell capacity only through government-owned satellite operators is “problematic,” it said. In China, only China DBSAT holds the licenses necessary to sell domestic satellite services, meaning foreign satellite companies must sell capacity to end users through that company, the report said. In India, foreign operators are precluded from participating directly in the provision of satellite capacity for the direct-to-home market, the USTR said.
U.S. carriers have been unable to negotiate an interconnection agreement with the carriers in Tonga, and are forced to send traffic through third countries, the review said. Tonga’s mandate would ensure that termination rates remain artificially above cost, it said. Similarly, Ghana mandated an increase in the termination rate for incoming international calls, requiring all operators to charge $0.19/minute to terminate incoming international calls, with 32 percent, 6 cents, of that rate to be collected by the telecom regulatory authority. Jamaica is levying a surcharge on the termination rate paid by international operators.
There’s been difficulty in obtaining local interconnection and long-distance termination into certain rural areas of Mexico, the review said. It noted retaliatory actions taken by Mexican operator Telmex in a yet-to-be resolved dispute regarding interconnection rates and a claim that Mexican operator Telcel’s mobile termination rates are significantly above cost.
The review cited VoIP barriers, including regulatory regimes that impose the same requirements on VoIP providers as on traditional fixed or mobile voice providers. It also cited as potential hurdles to trade allowing incumbent operators to block the ability of companies to provide VoIP services over the incumbent’s broadband network, and the inability to provide VoIP services that connect to the public switched network.