ANACOM has taken the view that Portugal Telecom should provide its competitors a telephone line resale offer, so that the latter may develop their own retail offers, thus adding value to the final client through the establishment of innovative services. New operators are thereby enabled to compete with PT offers, as they will be provided with conditions to render available diversified services that aggregate the access price and the telephone traffic price.
The imposition upon PT of the obligation to present a network line resale offer, the so-called SLRO, enables the final client to have a single interlocutor as regards the provision of a telephone service and to have a single bill, a situation which currently does not occur, as clients which have an operator other than PT receive two bills, one from PT and the other from its service provider. The existence of a single bill has been one of the most demanded factors by new operators, as it will represent a facilitating element as regards their penetration in the market.
The imposition of this obligation upon PT is justified by the fact that the historic operator holds significant market power in the access market. In the analysis of narrowband retail markets carried out by the regulator on 14 December, and which resulted in the conclusion that the undertakings of the PT Group have significant market power, ANACOM referred the need to impose upon PT the presentation of a wholesale offer concerning the resale of the network line, having undertaken the commitment of defining the minimum elements that the incumbent operator must include in its offer. About a month after concluding the market analysis, the regulator's Board approved the elements that PT is bound to include in the offer it must present and which comprise the indication of beneficiaries of the SLRO, which in the view of the regulator are those entities which provide services in pre-selection and those undertakings that provide broadband Internet access services; and the type of access comprised in the offer.
The definition of the services comprised in the SLRO - which shall include selection and pre-selection services, calls for non-eligible numbers, Internet access services, additional services/service facilities provided by the undertakings of the PT Group, and leasing of terminal equipment of the telephone service at a fixed location - the prices, the processes of implementation and the billing and collecting of the comprised services are other elements to be included in the offer. The parameters and levels of quality of service, as well as the penalties for non-compliance, the relationship with the end-user, the definition of liabilities in the scope of dispute resolution, and the relationship between the SLRO and other wholesale services shall also integrate the offer which PT is to present to the regulator. This proposal shall be submitted at the most thirty days following the final determination of ICP-ANACOM on this matter.
Interested operators may assess the draft determination of ANACOM on the minimum elements to be comprised in the reference offer for the subscriber line resale offer, within a twenty-day time limit.
Consult:
- Reference SLRO offer https://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?contentId=418790
