Universal Service Regulations with United Perspectives on the Access Charge Controls and Price Controls

Abstract

Universal service regulation has introduced in order to expand a penetration of telephone services in respect of government policies and have evolved resulting from market openness and fully competitive market based regulations. What are the approaches of competitive market based regulations that the price controls and access charge controls have been introduced. Regulators have taken account of the regulatory direction of universal service obligation strongly related to price controls and access charge controls. In Korea, Universal Service Fund was founded in 2000 after local telephone service competitor entered. Prior to 2000, access charges included switching costs and universal service cost incurred providing network access to use telephone services in affordable rate. Besides local call price controls was permitted from government and not allowable to rebalance rates by universal service provider and the rates was not recovered cost of providing services. This paper presents the review of universal service regulation through the integrated analysis on access charge controls and price controls in several counties and the relationships between the three regulations