On 19.10.2009, ICP-ANACOM, in order to establish the conditions to be set in RIO 2010, requested PT Comunicações, S.A. (PTC), pursuant to article 108, paragraph 1, of Law no. 5/2004, of 10 February (ECL) to provide information deemed necessary to update analyses developed by this Authority on interconnection, namely concerning interconnection traffic volumes and unit cost estimates for 2010. It was also referred that PTC could send any other data considered relevant.
On 02.11.2009 1, PTC delivered data requested by ICP-ANACOM on interconnection traffic volumes, mentioning that the production of unit cost estimates for 2010 depended on budget information, and that it expected such information to be available by the first half of December. For this purpose, the company thus requested an extension of the deadline to submit this information by the week of 15 December. PTC informed also that the company intended to send at the time a duly substantiated interconnection traffic proposal for 2010.
Subsequently, by fax dated 15.12.2009, ICP-ANACOM informed PTC that the deadline extension had been accepted, and that the Authority thus awaited the provision of the referred information, as well as the price proposal, in order to examine further this issue.
On 18.12.2009, PTC informed that a price proposal could only be presented after the cost-accounting information for the first half of 2009 was available, which was likely to occur by the end of the year. On 30.12.2009, PTC sent the referred information, as well as an interconnection price proposal for 2010, based on costs incurred in 2008 (as unit costs for interconnection services in 2010, according to the company, are assumed to be similar to those in 2008), and taking into account the principle of cost-orientation of prices for all services.
The following section of this document presents an analysis of PTC’s proposal and of terms currently in force, taking also into consideration the European context, especially at the level of pre-accession countries of the European Union (EU 15).
By determination of 15.04.2010, ICP-ANACOM’s Management Board decided to submit the draft determination (DD) it intended to adopt to a prior hearing of interested parties and simultaneously to a public consultation. Comments received within the deadline defined by ICP-ANACOM, the corresponding analysis and the decision’s grounds are included in the “Report of the prior hearing on the draft determination of 15.04.2010, regarding the RIO conditions for 2010”, which is an inherent part hereof.
The referred DD was also notified to the European Commission (EC) and to National Regulatory Authorities (NRA) of other Member States, pursuant to article 57 of Law number 5/2004, of 10 February.
It is further noted that a cycle of market analyses is now reaching an end, and that ICP - ANACOM is preparing a re-analysis of markets 2 and 3 of Commission Recommendation 2007/879/EC, of 17 December 2007 on relevant product and service markets within the electronic communications sector susceptible to ex ante regulation 2, from which arises the obligation on PTC to publish a RIO every year. Within this context, and bearing also in mind that the assessment method applied in RIO’s annual review has been used for a considerable amount of time, it is deemed, in the framework of the re-analysis of the referred markets, that it is necessary to examine whether the present method remains appropriate, in the scope of which contributions from market participants will be taken into consideration. For this reason, the impact of alterations arising from this DD has been minimized, and the methodological guidelines usually applied have been maintained in general (as the following sections hereof will show).
1 Document ICP-S56026/2009.
2 These markets correspond to markets 8 and 9 of Commission Recommendation 2003/311/EC, namely: Market 8: Call origination in the public telephone network at a fixed location; Market 9 - Call termination in individual public telephone networks at a fixed location.
