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Dubai: The UAE's telecom regulator on Tuesday urged the two operators, etisalat and du, not to 'cross subsidise' tariffs, and cautioned against 'pricing some services with less than their actual cost', saying these are against TRA's price control policies.
Mohammad Al Ganem, board member and director-general of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA), on Tuesday asked the operators to abide by its Price Control Policy (PCP) - a mechanism aimed at protecting the existing telecom rates.
Consumer interest
"The PCP aims at protecting the consumers' interests via strengthening permanent competition in the telecom sector through preventing practices that may endanger competition such as cross subsidisation, hooking the consumers with long-term contracts, pricing some services with less than their actual cost, and other similar practices that contradict with the concept of fair competition," Al Ganem said a statement.
He, however, did not explain how its policy would protect the consumers' interest when it's control mechanism is aimed at protecting the price, rather than passing the benefits of the competition to the consumers.
"The TRA obliges the telecom operators to comply with its policies and procedures that are related to price control, where the operators have to acquire the TRA approval on the services prices."
The TRA has reviewed 113 price requests from etisalat in 2007 that encompass 944 price reviews. Out of the 113, 17.7 per cent were rejected because they did not comply with the PCP, 18.6 per cent were returned to the sender because the applications were not complete, where 63.7 per cent were approved, Al Ganem said.
"In such cases, the TRA rejects the pricing requests that do not comply with the PCP, and hence hinder competition and consumer interests," he said.
Meanwhile, commenting on the Internet Penetration Policy, Al Ganem said: "The TRA is in the process of declaring the Internet Penetration Policy before the end of 2008. However, since du is a new company that has just started to implement the concept of monitoring, the TRA has informed du to comply with the policy within a month from the date it is issued."
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