Incumbent telcos Globe Telecom Inc. and Smart Communications Inc. should not limit or cut their interconnection with third telco player DITO Telecommunity Corp., according to a former commissioner of the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC).
Eliseo Rio, who had also served as undersecretary of the Department of Information and Communications Technology, said the interconnection between telcos is important for public service and the telecom regulator has to mandate the telcos to provide adequate interconnection facilities so that their subscribers can communicate with each other.
“Any restriction on interconnection, specially from more dominant player/s is considered an anti-competitive action,” Rio said in a recent Facebook post.
Rio added telcos in the Philippines cannot opt to decide not to interconnect, citing Section 2 of Executive Order No. 59 issued in 1993 by former President Fidel Ramos which states that “interconnection between NTC authorized public telecommunications carriers shall be compulsory.”
Last week, DITO filed complaints before the Philippine Competition Commission about the alleged anti-competitive practices of Globe and Smart in their interconnection agreements, seeing this as an abuse of their dominant position.
Both Globe and Smart responded to the claim, reiterating that they have always played fair in the market.
The statements revealed that the incumbent telcos had conditions before they could provide better interconnection for DITO subscribers.
Globe said it asked the NTC to “temporarily disconnect the interconnection trunk lines” between them due to the issue of alleged fraudulent calls from DITO.
Smart, for its part, admitted that DITO requested additional interconnection capacity. But for the Pangilinan-led firm to act on the request, it presented a number of conditions for DITO, including procedures for handling “illegal bypass traffic” and the “formula for the computation of penalties for said fraudulent calls.”
Rio, however, said international simple resale (ISR) activities have long been a problem in the market since his stint at the NTC in the early 2000s, but he stressed that ISR activities “were never used to restrict interconnection between and among telcos.”
“In fact, ISR can only be solved by the full cooperation of telcos and the government, including remuneration for any loss suffered by a telco, without sacrificing the public service interest of telecommunication,” Rio said.
“Limiting the access of one telco’s subscribers to the network of another telco because of ISR issues does not solve the problem because the illegal operator merely shifts to the network that has more access to other telcos,” he added.
Officials from DITO earlier said 70 to 80 percent of calls to other operators do not get through, way below the NTC’s requirement that an interconnection quality must have a failure rate of no more than 1 percent.
Rio called on the government to give “more focus” on DITO’s complaints as “the public will suffer” if the interconnection issue persists.