Hoping to further aid competition in the sector, the Public Utilities Commission [PUC] has begun inviting formal comments on its plan to provide a set of guidelines to govern interconnection among licensed telecommunications providers in The Bahamas.
On Monday, the regulators released a public notice to that effect, a consultation document and its proposed guidelines.
Interconnection enables customers of one network to successfully complete a call to another customer irrespective of whether the originator of the call and the call recipient are connected to the same network or service provided by the same licensee.
“Without interconnection, new operators would be obliged to duplicate expensive infrastructure, and consumers would have to subscribe to the different operators’ networks to be able to call each other,” the public consultation document stated.
“Such complexities will increase costs to consumers. Therefore interconnection goes beyond competition issues and bears on questions to consumer protection and economic efficiency.”
The proposed interconnection guidelines are intended to provide guidance to the Bahamas Telecommunications Company [BTC] and any other dominant operator in preparing its Reference Interconnection Offer [RIO].
clarifying its expectations, these guidelines will facilitate the preparation and approval of BTC’s RIO, and so makes it easier for other licensed operators to enter into interconnection agreements with BTC, the regulators said. It is also expected that the guidelines will reduce the cost of preparing RIOs and negotiating agreements.
According to PUC officials, in addition to supporting the expansion of competition in the future, the development of transparent and non-discriminatory arrangements for interconnection is important to ensure the maximum possible benefit to users of telecommunications services from the current level of competition.
In the absence of these interconnection guidelines, the Systems Resource Group [SRG] which operates rival IndiGO Networks has filed several complaints about BTC allegedly not facilitating interconnection, complaining that the company has essentially been frustrating the development of competition.
Citing specifically proposed interconnection in Abaco, SRG’s head Paul Hutton Ashkenny noted that his company made the request more than 15 months ago and “to date, despite the fact that BTC is required under its license to provide interconnection to other operators at any technically feasible point, BTC has refused all efforts to bring about interconnection.”
Mr. Ashkenny also claimed that efforts to move forward on the provision of additional interconnection circuits have proven fruitless and he lamented BTC failing to accommodate the routing of emergency service calls originating on IndiGO’s network saying it creates a significant breach in public safety.
But BTC officials have said they are in continuous talks with IndiGO on the matters raised.
The PUC is accepting comments from the public until the end of July. Those comments will be considered in determining the approach to the issues raised in the Public Consultation Document.
The proposed interconnection guidelines are for domestic and international voice services between fixed and mobile operators. They would specifically relate to the provision of currently competitive services being offered including intra-island and interisland voice telephony, international voice telephony (using BTC’s infrastructure).
Additionally, it would apply to services which the government has indicated it intends to liberalize in the future like cellular mobile services, and additional competition in international, inter-island and local public voice services.
By: Tameka Lundy, The Bahama Journal
