TAF Group’s achievements

1. TAF Group’s achievements Study period: 1997-2000 pape-gorgui.toure@itu.int Head, Financing Strategies Unit (Former TAF Group Chairman)

2. TAF membership • 48 countries • low teledensities • large diversity of situations

3. Main goals • telephone services tariffs • Build a common basis in order to help the international telephone network operators calculate/negotiate their settlement rates; • provide the telephone network operators with a computer tool in order to calculate the telephone services tariffs

4. D.600R main pillars • Take into consideration de differences within the Group; • practicability -> type of data needed for both cost and traffic information; • interdependence of services cost; • includes access costs; • no more ceiling; • default and reference values -> Client-Server

5. Extension of the principles • Satisfy the regulatory needs: USO policy setting; • tariff rebalancing • satisfy the needs expressed by regulators and operators as regards interconnection: • interconnection costing; • USO costs determination and reallocation; • USO policies simulation

7. BDT support • Practical cost, tariff and interconnection calculation workshops: The TAF model have been applied to more than 20 countries and has been declared mature before the BDT engage the final software development • individual support to operators and regulators (country case studies); • commercial version of the TAF software to be available early next year

8. The model acceptance depends on the availability of the mandatory data Usefulness to NRA: provide means to avoid regulatory arbitrages Usefulness to operators Obtained upon usage of consistent data, the model based tariffs should guarantee reasonable profit to an operator; field trials needed before final acceptance Lessons learned on modelling costs