The regulatory regime must offer clear, detailed guidelines on the rights of access seekers and obligations of access providers. The development of the regulatory regime's guidelines should include processes that offer all interested parties an opportunity to express their views. Methods, such as accounting principles or structural separation of services, should be established in advance, in order that data are already available should disputes arise. Incumbents should be encouraged to view market liberalization as a business opportunity, not as threat. Information from the workshop will be added to the Framework.
Further comments are still welcome.
The Task Group hopes to finalize the Framework at Tel 19. The Task Group is drafting a set of interconnection principles that elaborate on the principles articulated in the Reference Paper attached to the WTO Basic Telecom Agreement. The Steering Group members discussed an early draft of the Principles at Interconnection. Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Thailand, among others, expressed the concern that all operators in an economy should provide interconnection, not only major suppliers. At the end of the discussion, it was resolved that to minimize government regulation of the market, major suppliers are the operators that should have the obligation to interconnect.