Committed to transparency and consumer protection, and implementing World’s Best Practices, the UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) reviews the marketing offers and services prices of the two telecom operators in the UAE – “etisalat” and “du” – within its Price Control Policy (PCP).
In this regard, H.E. Mohamed Al Ghanim, Board Member & Director General of the TRA, commented: “Serving the interests of the consumer, the TRA obliges the telecom operators to comply with its policies and procedures that are related to price control, where the operators have to acquire the TRA approval on the services prices and marketing offers when they want to change the prices of their existing services or when they want to provide new services. The PCP aims at protecting the consumers’ interests via strengthening permanent competition in the telecom sector through preventing practices that may endanger competition such as cross subsidization, hooking the consumers with long-term contracts, pricing some services with less than their actual cost, and other similar practices that contradict with the concept of fair competition. In such cases, the TRA rejects the pricing requests that do not comply with the PCP, and hence hinder competition and consumer interests.”
Mr. Al Ghanim continued: “It should be known that the TRA is always keen on reviewing the pricing requests at the fastest possible way to identify whether the proposed prices endanger competition and the interests of the consumers; bearing in mind that the TRA is aware of the importance of rapid responses due to the requirements of the competitive market.”
“The PCP states that the TRA should respond to the pricing requests within a maximum period of 30 working days. When the operator request is proper, the TRA takes the proper decision in a record time, where most of the times the operator does not include all the required information in the application that forces the TRA to send back for completion; yet, the TRA explains to the operator in details the reasons for sending the application back,” clarified Al Ghanim.
Mr. Al Ghanim continued: “The TRA has review 113 price requests from Etisalat in 2007 that encompass 944 price reviews. Out of the 113, 17.7% were rejected because they did not comply with the PCP, 18.6% were returned to sender because the applications were not complete, where 63.7% were approved. The TRA, however, asked Etisalat to inform it of the date of implementing the proposals, especially those proposals that are related to marketing offers. Out of the responses the TRA received, it concluded that, except for the marketing offers, Etisalat average time in implementing their approved proposals is around 118 days.”
As for the proxy, Mr. Al Ghanim declared: “the TRA is in the process of declaring the Internet Penetration Policy before the end of 2008. However, since Du is a new company that has just started to implement the concept of monitoring at the best possible way, the TRA official informed Du to comply with the Policy within a month from the date it is issued.
