Customers will have to pay to receive a telephone line in certain rural areas if it costs Eircom more than €7,000 to install the connection to their homes.
Under new proposals published yesterday by the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg), Eircom will be forced to install a telephone line within 12 months of a request. However, if this request costs Eircom over €7,000, the customer will have to meet the additional costs of the connection fee.
The proposals, detailed in a document entitled Universal Service Requirements, are an attempt to meet complaints from the general public about the length of time that Eircom is taking to connect their homes to its network.
ComReg has said that members of the public have approached it complaining of inordinate delays in providing phone connections or what they believe is a refusal to meet their requests by Eircom.
Under the current universal service rules Eircom is to respond to "every reasonable" request for a phone line at a standard cost to the consumer of €121.93.
But Eircom has lobbied intensively against the rules, which it claims cost it some €40 million per year.
The new rules setting out Eircom's universal service obligation will attempt to define what is a "reasonable request" for a line. ComReg notes there have been complaints from customers that Eircom was simply refusing to connect them at all if it felt a line request was unreasonable.
Under the proposed new universal service guidelines Eircom will have to provide a connection within a year of receiving a reasonable request. A reasonable request is one that can be delivered by Eircom within a cost threshold of €7,000.
In these cases customers will only pay the connection fee of €121.93, VAT inclusive.
Under the new rules a customer would have to meet the additional costs of connecting a line into a home in the limited number of cases where it costs Eircom more than €7,000 to meet a particular request.
ComReg says that this would be 0.13 per cent of total requests, amounting to about 100 people per year.
ComReg sets out a performance timetable for the timely delivery of telephone connections in the document, which range from four weeks to a year. The proposed delivery timetable is: 60 per cent of requests should be met within four weeks; 80 per cent within eight weeks; 90 per cent within 13 weeks; 95 per cent within 26 weeks; and 100 per cent within 52 weeks.
ComReg said it considered the proposals were essential if consumers were to have a transparent set of performance standards and a universal service.
