NBN makes final call on wholesale pricing

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NBN makes final call on wholesale pricing

By Lucy Battersby

NBN Co will confirm today its wholesale pricing - what it will charge companies to resell its network - in a final draft of its commercial agreement.

It is expected to keep basic access prices for each line at $24 a month for approved resellers. This was the price released last December in the Corporate Plan.

Retail internet companies will have to pay the access fee to deliver the most basic telephone and internet service to a house or business. Higher speeds and data carriage will cost more.

NBN Co, the company building a national fibre-optic broadband network, will also release a discussion paper seeking industry comment on its longer-term regulatory and reporting obligations. This is a precursor to a draft ''special access undertaking'', which sets out NBN Co's future regulatory obligations. The undertaking does not need to be in place for the wholesale agreement to be released and requires approval from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

The wholesale broadband agreement spells out how NBN Co will supply internet services to its customers, including prices, products, billing conditions, network access and security.

NBN Co has promised to offer all wholesale customers the same conditions. However, there have been some disputes over drafts. Some in the industry flagged concern the agreement limited NBN Co's liability to wholesale customers if networks broke down. A clause sought to limit payouts to what could be recovered from the supplier, if that supplier was responsible for the problem.

An NBN Co spokeswoman said yesterday: ''In general terms, NBN Co is responsible for the supply of services as set out in the wholesale broadband agreement.

''However, we have spelt out the specific areas where failure to supply is not our fault and therefore we can't be held liable - such as an error or omission by a customer, or 'excluded' events.''

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