US Federal Communications Commission chairman Reed Hundt said in a speech to the Asia Society in Hong Kong that the principal purpose of his trip to Hong Kong was to urge Asian countries to improve their offers in the World Trade Organization telecommunications talks that are scheduled to end next February. Hundt also directed his comments at Hong Kong regulators, saying the British Crown Colony’s international phone monopoly causes consumers in both the US and Hong Kong to pay a very ‘fishy price,’ a price for international service that is many times above the cost of such service. The ability of Hong Kong Telecommunications Ltd to extract monopoly rates from consumers in the US and Hong Kong is not consistent with the principles of competition and open markets for which Hong Kong is so justly famous, he added. He also complained that the result of the Cable & Wireless Plc affiliate setting such high tariffs on the route has been a sharp increase in so-called call-back services, w here a caller first establishes contact with a server in the US from which the call is established as a US-to-Hong Kong call. The result is that seven calls originate in the US for every one from Hong Kong, compared with a one-to-one balance about 18 months ago, according to Reed Hundt, and since international telephone revenue is shared more or less equally by companies in the origination and destination countries, Hong Kong Telecommunications Ltd is profiting unfairly as a monopoly.
