The UAE’s Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRA) has called on the country’s two operators Etisalat and Du to avoid pricing practices which breach the TRA’s price control policy (PCP), reports ArabianBusiness.com. While the regulator fell short of accusing the operators of illegal pricing, it confirmed that it has rejected more than 17% of Etisalat’s requests to introduce new marketing offers or service charges.
Director-general of the TRA Mohamed Al Ghanim said, ‘The TRA had to 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…because the applications were not complete [and] 63.7% were approved.’ He added that the telecom operators must comply with the TRA’s PCP, and that they must get TRA approval to change the prices of their existing services or provide new services. ‘The PCP aims at protecting the consumers…through preventing practices that may endanger competition such as cross-subsidisation, 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,’ Al Ghanim said.