ARCEP makes public its decision imposing a decrease in the France Telecom VAS surcharge, resulting from the settlement of a dispute between SFR and France Telecom.

Paris, 3 December 2010

The French Postal and electronic communications regulatory authority is making public the decision it issued in response to a complaint that the firm SFR filed against France Telecom on 30 July 2010.

Context and subject of the complaint

As part of its business operations in the traffic collection market for calls to VAS (value-added service) numbers, the carrier SFR purchases a dedicated call origination service from France Telecom when its customers call VAS numbers for which SFR collects the traffic.

France Telecom invoices this dedicated call origination service with a mark-up referred to as a VAS surcharge. This surcharge is supposed to reflect the cost of hosting the France Telecom retail technical support service for calls to VAS numbers, for handling instances that ultimately result from malfunctions that are due to an operator other than the originating operator (France Telecom).

SFR had filed a complaint concerning the different rates that France Telecom was applying to this VAS surcharge, and appealed to ARCEP to settle the matter.

The ARCEP decision

The Authority recognised the merits of the case submitted by SFR. As a result, France Telecom must invoice SFR an identical VAS surcharge for all special numbers in the national numbering plan, regardless of format, and bring the highest pricing tier in line with the lowest pricing tier which has applied up until now to 086B and 3BPQ numbers, in other words a maximum 0.017 eurocents a minute, excluding VAT, for the regular rate, 0.011 eurocents a minute, excluding VAT, for the reduced rate and 0.007 eurocents a minute, excluding VAT, for the night-time "blue" rate - and taking effect as of 13 March 2009.