ACCC final tick of approval for Telstra SSU compliance

Telstra inked the original SSU — approved by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in 2012 — which requires the telco to restrict commercially sensitive wholesale information from its retail business.

The ACCC said on Tuesday it now considered Telstra’s remediation programme completed and is satisfied with the reporting measuresTelstra has in place with the SSU.

The ACCC set out conditions of the SSU after long-standing competition concerns were raised about Telstra's involvement in both wholesale and retail markets.

{loadposition peter}The SSU requires Telstra to comply with a number of equivalence and transparency obligations, including information security obligations, with the measures aimed at safeguarding competition until Telstra has migrated its fixed-line customers to the NBN when the network build is completed.  

After the original SSU was implemented in 2012, and despite efforts by Telstra to safeguard information, the ACCC subsequently reported breaches to the SSU in all four of its annual reports – breaches, which the ACCC acknowledges were all reported by Telstra itself.

To remedy the breaches, Telstra took on a large-scale, complex remediation programme to fix its legacy IT system's issues in 2014, which the ACCC announced on Tuesday is now complete.

As part of the remediation process, the ACCC engaged an independent expert consultant — Ovum — to conduct a thorough review of the remediation project. To read an executive summary of the Ovum report, click here.

“The ACCC is pleased that Telstra’s long-running project to achieve compliance with its SSU has concluded,” ACCC chairman Rod Sims said.

“The ACCC is now satisfied that Telstra’s SSU reporting measures can be relied on to identify any further information security issues, should they arise,” he concluded.