Eircom is not discriminating against customers of other telecoms providers when it comes to repairing repeat faults, a ComReg investigation has found.
Eircom is required by law not to discriminate against Other Authorised Operators (OAOs) with regard to interconnection.
The first phase of ComReg’s investigation compared Eircom’s performance in repairing PSTN services for its own customers and those of OAOs. That investigation found Eircom non-compliant, with Eircom having been shown to have repaired a higher proportion of faults for its own customers within two days than for OAO customers. That investigation covered the period from December 2006 to May 2007. Eircom had remedied the problem by March 2008.
The second phase of the investigation, covering June 2007 to November 2007, saw ComReg examining the issue of repeat PSTN faults. ComReg announced on Friday that Eircom was compliant with its universal service obligation in this regard, showing no significant differences between either the proportion of repeat faults for Eircom and OAO customers or in the time it took to make repairs.
ComReg said the proportion of repeat faults for OAOs is no higher than would be expected due to the overall market share of OAOs.
ComReg also analysed data for when the faults were logged and cleared on the Unified Gateway (UG) as opposed to when the same faults were logged and cleared on Eircom’s Fault Handling System (FHS).
It found that the UG does not appear to add to the time it took to repair repeat faults as perceived by the OAOs. As the data examined was a full-day granularity, ComReg said it was assessing whether there is a need to look at the impact on short-duration faults which could be masked by this metric.
The longer opening hours for Eircom’s repair service centre than that of the OAOs did not appear to affect the overall relative operational performance for repeat fault repair either, ComReg added.
ComReg announced its intention to examine other aspects of Eircom’s PSTN fault repair and would publish findings subsequently.
By Niall Byrne
