PRESS RELEASE: Monthly Monitoring Report No. 01/2020
Prague, 15 January 2019 – The associations which provide Internet access service are undertakings in the electronic communications and a subject to notification to CTU. This follows from the monthly monitoring report which describes a case of one association from Chrudim.
In a final decision, CTU concluded that the only difference between the association’s conduct and the operator’s conduct is that the association declares it does not intend to make profits. But simultaneously, it does its utmost to continuously increase the number of its customers and take over clients from competitors, thereby increasing its income. Therefore, CTU decided it is a business in the field of electronic communications, a subject to notification. CTU will continue to pay increased attention to the issue of associations providing publicly available electronic communications services in order to harmonize the business environment in electronic communications. It recommends such entities to consider, whether they are not subject to the notification obligation, and at least additionally meet this obligation by duly notifying their business to CTU when the business licence is only established on the day of notification to CTU. It should be noted that not only failure to notify business, but also unauthorized business, which the entity commits by pursuing its activity without making the appropriate notification, is an offence.
In the “From decision-making practice” part, the monitoring report informs about a case with a burgled package. A customer ordered and paid for a tablet in advance, however, he was only delivered an empty box. The Czech Post refused the subsequent complaint. A later police investigation showed, that a SIM card owned by a brother-in-law of the Czech Post driver, who picked up the package, was inserted in the tablet. Based on these and other facts, CTU concluded, that the content of the package was stolen during the postal transport, allowed the objection and ordered the Czech Post to pay a compensation amounting to CZK 21,539.
The monitoring report further points out the conclusion from an inspection of three largest domestic operators regarding complaints procedure. The inspection revealed that reporting a failure, technical defects or outage in the provision of services is not formally recorded by the operators as a complaint about these services. The operators receive reports on possible failures and remove such failures, but do not consider the reports themselves as complaints. CTU therefore recommends that in the event of any defect or outage in the provision of services, customers not only report these problems in accordance with the specified procedure, but also, if they wish to make the claim for compensation for such incurred problems, simultaneously demonstrably complain about the defective service, where an integral part of such a complaint should be the requirement to reduce the price of the service. How to claim a complaint and what to do if the customer is not satisfied with the result is described on CTU’s website.
The monitoring report also presents CTU’s priorities for 2020 which follow Plan of activities adopted by the CTU Council. The main priority is to hold a frequency auction in the 700 MHz and 3.6 GHz bands, in order to create conditions for better competition on the mobile market. CTU will also actively participate on finalising the release process of the 700 MHz band which has been used for terrestrial digital television broadcasting and on the relating transition to the DVB-T2 standard.
The monitoring report is available here.