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0867 Working Group Report 31/03/00

Report of 0867 Working Group

27 March 2000

Activity to date

Peter DT was informed by Telecom lawyers that the Commerce Commission is in possession of a large amount of material relating to the 0867 issue due to the enquiry currently being held by the Commission. I was approached to analyse this material on a consultancy basis and report back. I duly contacted the Commission and was informed that much of the material was considered confidential, but a request under the Official Information Act would be considered.

Note that the Commerce Commission is not a public inquiry, so material handed to it is not necessarily public domain.

Three documents have been obtained from the Commission under the Official Information. These are:

  • Managing Residential Internet Traffic, A presentation to Ministry of Commerce and Treasury Telecom Briefing Presentation to Government, June 1999. 17 pages (printouts of presentation slides, one slide per page).
  • 0867 service - briefing note Telecom Briefing Notes to Government, June 1999, three pages.
  • 0867 Service by Telecom, Changing customer needs and their consequences NZIER Report to Telecom, February 2000, 35 pages.
The first document contains nothing that had not already been presented in the press.

However, the other two documents (made available to Council and the 0867 WG at http://www.daedalus.co.nz/~don/0867/index.html make considerable mention of interconnect payments as a major driver for the introduction of the 0867 service, a fact that had been deduced by those working on the issue but not publically acknowledged by Telecom or other telcos.

The ISOCNZ Position paper (July 1999) states:

  1. Motivations

    We believe that the issue of interconnect payments, although discounted in Telecom's response, do represent a significant factor in this move. Even if this were not a factor in Telecom's motivation for this move, it must be recognised that there is an immediate financial effect on those Internet service providers that collect interconnect revenue from Telecom, be it directly or indirectly through another carrier.

    ISOCNZ cannot predict whether the removal of these interconnection payments due to moving to an 0867 number will seriously affect the Internet services industry in NZ. Sixty-eight percent of the voters stated that ISOCNZ should not be involved in the issue of interconnect payments.

The papers obtained do not discuss the definition of "Internet" calls, a major issue raised by the existing ISOCNZ position paper.

With 0867 now almost fully depolyed, the focus of the working group has moved to the monitoring of problems etc associated with the 0867 deployment.

An area of concern is the movement of ISPs to Telecom for PSTN access following the 0867 announcement. There also appear to be some billing issues relating to non-0867 issues.

Action items include contacting and meeting telcos and interested parties, and considering efforts required for the upcoming Commission of Enquiry into telecommunications.

Don Stokes

© 2000 The Internet Society of New Zealand
Last updated 13 April 2000

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