Macquarie Telecom lodge anti-competitive conduct complaint about regional mobile services

Telstra has misused its market power to lock regional consumers and businesses into sub standard services and unfairly limited their choice of mobile providers, according to a complaint lodged with the competition watchdog today by Macquarie Telecom.

This, at a time when the Federal Government is proposing another $100 million grants package to address the inferior mobile services regional customers face compared to those in cities.

The complaint says Telstra has:

* Refused to supply wholesale services where it has a monopoly mobile network

* Refused to offer 4G services to wholesale customers, only providing 3G services 

* Forced wholesale customers to impose more restrictive data caps on their customers than Telstra applies itself, and

* Has its own retail business overseeing and approving wholesale contracts, creating a system whereby it can manipulate the market to anti-competitive ends.

“Macquarie has asked the ACCC to urgently investigate and act to stop Telstra from undermining competition in regional markets,” Matt Healy, Macquarie Telecom National Executive - Industry and Policy, said.

“Telstra’s dominance of mobile markets has increased in recent years, and it uses this dominance to prevent competition from gaining a foothold in fixed line and corporate markets as well as by bundling services together,” Mr Healy said.

Telstra was supplying wholesale mobile services only in locations where its mobile competitors were already operating, denying regional consumers any choice at all in other locations.This behaviour was occurring at the same time as the Federal Government is planning to spend $100 million of taxpayers’ money to fill coverage gaps in regional mobile services.

“Telstra will no doubt have its hand out for more taxpayer freebies, but its contempt for regional Australians is on full display in its behaviour in wholesale markets,” Mr Healy said.

“Macquarie hopes the ACCC moves quickly and decisively to end this monopolistic behaviour.”

Ends 

Contact: Matt Healy - 0402 259 140

Second Contact: Julia Diprose – 0409 84 81 86