IT’S back to the future to improve mobile coverage in the bush, following the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s high profile inquiry into the introduction of mandatory roaming for mobile network providers.
The consumer watchdog found no evidence to support a declaration for roaming, where telcos are forced to allow other networks access to their network.
But it did not canvass any alternatives to what the report acknowledged is still the “overwhelming concern” of people in the bush: network coverage.
There’s a welter of recently completed and ongoing in telecommunications inquiries and still no sign of a definitive policy shift to significantly improve coverage. This year the spotlight is on the Telecommunications Universal Service Obligation; the Federal Government’s Telecommunications Reform Package and the communications market more broadly.
The inquiry’s draft determination didn’t consider alternate solutions improve the situation for regional residents who suffer glacial data delivery and infuriatingly intermittent, outside of roaming.
That means another round of consultation and stakeholder group discussion before the ACCC final report.
“We don’t want to hold roaming declaration inquires over people's heads. We want networks to invest with some level of investment certainty,” ACCC chairman Rod Sims said.
“Once our final review is done that would be it from us on this issue.”
But the ACCC listed several areas of interest, which indicates there could be more meat on the policy bone when a final report is issued, slated for mid-way through this year.
“We have nominated four areas where we see where extra things could be done [to improve coverage and competition],” Mr Sims said.
ACCC concerns:
- Access for all telcos to install network equipment on mobile towers built with taxpayers’ funds (currently, a telco that wins Mobile Black Spot funding to build a tower is permitted to build to a minimum specification, where the tower is too weak to support anything bar their equipment).
- Review the efficiency of the Mobile Black Spot Program
- Ensure the future allocation of spectrum frequency is well-managed
- Improve the accuracy of network coverage maps to allow consumers to make informed decisions.
While Mr Sims didn’t buy into what he dubbed Telstra’s “scare campaign” that investment in network expansion would cease under roaming, he said roaming risked further investment “at the margins” of the network.
Telstra and Optus are in healthy competition, building new towers to extend their networks in certain rural and regional areas, he said.
Getting signal into the paddock, not just to towns, is critical and he sympathised with people who had submitted case studies to the inquiry, with many alerting the ACCC to their need to carry two different mobile devices to cobble together coverage where they live.
So far stakeholder groups haven’t expanded the debate about solutions beyond the issue roaming, even though it could never have reasonably be viewed as a panacea.
But in the wake of today’s news the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) has addressed one of the most significant hurdles to network expansion.
New towers, for the most part, rely on public co-investment through the Black Spot program, which is co-funded by telcos and taxpayers.
Mr Sims acknowledged concerns that taxpayer-funded towers were being built which excluded access to other competing telcos.
In effect, this gives the winning telco tender for a Black Spot tower an effective taxpayer-funded stranglehold on coverage, where a competitor would have to cover the full cost of a tower, to expand its network over the same area.
As Vodafone has pointed out, even though co-location of mobile network equipment on the one tower has some advantages for coverage, it only enables networks to duplicate services and in that way more inefficient than roaming.
ACCAN also recommended an investigation around rules for sharing backhaul transmission, which is how outlying arms link into the main network.
Mr Sims put faith in market forces to deliver a new solution to solve what has, so far, held back Australian farmers access to the next wave of data-driven precision agriculture and production systems.
“We’re confident somebody could provide coverage for the ‘internet of things’ in rural areas - we don’t believe roaming would impact this business case,” he said.
“The evidence is technology is moving so quickly those businesses could be there. Our judgement is that declaring roaming won’t help those business cases.”
The ACCC wants feedback on policy measures to improve mobile netowrks in the bush.