Antigua, October 14th, 2013 -- The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) on Monday commenced a four day workshop on Expert-Level Training on Regulatory Accounting and Cost Modeling in a Broadband Environment for National Regulatory Authorities and Operators.
The ITU recently released its “Measuring Information Society” report for 2013. Out of 157 countries Antigua was ranked 49th in the global ranking but second in the Caribbean –behind Barbados – and 5th in the Americas after the USA, Canada, Barbados and Uruguay.
ITU area Representative for the Caribbean, Cleveland Thomas said it is clear that Antigua remains one of the key leaders in the ICT sector in the Caribbean region.
“The union observes the tremendous strides the country has been making over the years and wishes to commend the administration for its vision and successes.” Thomas said.
According to the ITU in today’s converged digital environment, pricing and cost modeling practices are central to ensuring a fair and healthy competitive environment.
In addition, resolving related disputes expeditiously has emerged as a major challenge for regulators. Striking the right balance between different interests requires heads of regulatory authorities to be well informed on current costing and pricing strategies, their impact and implications on the national competitive landscape and the related skills required by staff.
In addition, traditional interconnection regulation has involved setting cost-based prices primarily for voice calls using circuit-switched network technology.
These per-minute prices have often been established through the construction of network cost models, in most cases bottom-up long-run incremental cost models developed by the regulator for this specific purpose.
However next generation networks (NGNs) are increasingly migrating to the use of IP technology.
For a while interconnection remained unchanged (with conversion back to circuit-switching at the point of interconnect), but as IP becomes the network technology of choice, so regulators have to establish new costing and pricing approaches for NGN interconnection.
The workshop will explore these critical issues through a mixture of lectures, case studies and role plays to demonstrate the on-going role of cost accounting and cost modeling in a broadband environment.
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