Public Consultation on the LRIC model guidelines

CITC Public Notice No.18

 

Public Notice PN No.18

Dated April 18, 2007

 

​Request for comments on CITC LRIC Model Guidelines paper

Introduction

The Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) wishes to develop an efficient competitive telecommunication market and to ensure that competing service providers have access to telecommunication facilities under reasonable terms.   

The CITC issued the Interconnection Guidelines in November 2003, in compliance with the Telecommunications Bylaw. Section 8 of the Guidelines state that the CITC’s objective is to adopt the Long Run Incremental Cost (LRIC) approach for interconnection pricing.   

Interconnection services are defined in the Saudi Telecommunications Company’s (STC) Reference Interconnection Offer (RIO).  However, STC has not used LRIC methods to set the current tariffs for interconnection services.

The CITC has prepared LRIC Model Guidelines that define the approach to be taken by the CITC and dominant service providers to determine LRIC levels for services.  The CITC is seeking comments on these guidelines.

Invitation to Comment

The CITC has announced its intention of pursuing fair and transparent processes leading to further liberalization of the ICT sector.  This includes the awarding of new licenses for the Fixed and Mobile Services.  The success of new service providers depends in large part on the tariff structure of interconnection and other key wholesale access services in the Kingdom. The CITC therefore invites the participation of interested parties to provide detailed comments on the LRIC Model Guidelines and particularly on the specific points raised in this Public Consultation document. This will help the CITC and service providers to develop the interconnection regime.

In providing comments, parties are kindly requested, where appropriate, to indicate the clause or section numbers in the mentioned documents to which their comments relate.

The CITC may publish the comments received from the interested parties in this Public Consultation process and may permit replies from other interested parties to comments received.

The parties are also kindly requested to specify contact details including the name of the party, in addition to the address and phone number(s).

The consultation document and any responses to it are not binding to the CITC.  All responses are the property of the CITC.

Procedure for development of the LRIC Model Guidelines

 

The CITC intends to consider all the comments and associated rationale, justifications, data and analysis, provided by interested parties, as well as the results of its own studies and analysis.   These shall be reflected in the final version of the LRIC Model Guidelines.

Responses to this Public Notice must be submitted to the CITC (in Microsoft Word format) on or before 3:00 pm local time on Saturday June 30, 2007 to either one of the following addresses:

Depending on the content of the submissions received, the CITC may decide to allow an additional period of around 2 weeks at the end of the public consultation process to allow interested parties to review and provide comments to the CITC on submissions made by other parties. In this event, the CITC will inform all interested parties of the process and timelines for this at the conclusion of the public consultation.

For this reason, all submissions by interested parties will be considered non-confidential, unless indicated otherwise by the party and will be publicly available at the end of the public consultation process on the CITC website.  In the event that parts of a submission contain confidential information, the submitter should either clearly indicate which areas are considered confidential, its justification to claim confidentiality and/or provide the CITC with a public version of the submission.