EXPLANATORY STATEMENT
Radiocommunications (Licensing and General) Regulations
(Amendment)
Statutory Rule No. 193 1989
Issued by the Authority of the Minister for Transport and Communications
Subsection 93(1) of the Radiocommunications Act 1983 (the Act) provides that the Governor-General may make regulations, not inconsistent with the Act, prescribing matters required or permitted by the Act to be prescribed or necessary or convenient to be prescribed for carrying out or giving effect to the Act.
Section 24 of the Act provides that the Minister may grant to an applicant a licence to operate and to possess specified radiocommunications transmitters or radiocommunications transmitters included in a class of radiocommunications transmitters.
Subregulation 2(5) of the Radiocommunications (Licensing and General) Regulations (the Regulations) provides for the specification of different classes of licence in Schedule 1 of the Regulations.
The ABC and SBS have the capacity to deliver additional communications services within the bandwidth of their television or FM radio broadcasting services on a national basis. Those ancillary communication services (ACS) are dependent on the existence of the primary signal for their transmission but are independent services in terms of content, which can only be received by specifically designed receivers intended to receive the ancillary signal.
Late in 1987 the Minister for Land Transport and Infrastructure Support announced licensing procedures for ACS including guidelines for the provision of ACS through the national broadcasting services. These guidelines provide for non-broadcast ACS to be licensed under the Act.
The ABC now proposes to enter into agreements with other parties to deliver ACS’s via satellite to all ABC transmitters for retransmission, along with the ABC national broadcast service, from all of the ABC’s terrestrial transmitters. In effect the proposals seek to use the teletext capacity of the ABC’s national television broadcasting service to provide a text based information service. The services are not broadcasting services within the terms of the Broadcasting Act 1942 as the special decoders, unlike normal teletext decoders, will be available only to a limited number of subscribers rather than be publicly available.
As the Regulations previously stood, the proposed ACS’s would, in effect, comprise multipoint distribution transmitters and receivers (subregulation 2(1) and Items 66 and 67 of Schedule 1 of the Regulations refer). As such, the services would attract total license fees in excess of $2 million for each service. The Minister decided that this level of fee was excessive and that new classes of licences and fees be provided to accommodate the provision of ACS via radio and television broadcasting services.
Accordingly, the Radiocommunications (Licensing and General) Regulations have been amended to provide for two new classes of licences known as ‘Ancillary communications service network, Class A’, for ACS’s provided via radio broadcasting services, and ‘Ancillary communications service network, Class B’, for ACS’s provided via television broadcasting services.
Details of the amendments are as follows:
Principal Regulations
1. Provides that for the purposes of the amendments, ‘Principal Regulations’ means the Radiocommunications (Licensing and General) Regulations.
Interpretation
2. Amends regulation 2 of the Principal Regulations by inserting a new generic definition of ‘ancillary communications service network’, and by amending the definitions of ‘multipoint distribution station receiver’ and ‘narrowband area receiver’.
Paragraph (a) provides for a new defintion of ‘ancillary communications service network’ which means a network of stations used for the provision of an ACS via a radio or television broadcasting signal.
Paragraph (b) amends the definition of ‘multipoint distribution station receiver’ so as to exclude from this class of receiver any receivers which are used solely for the reception of a television ACS.
Paragraph (c) amends the definition of ‘narrowband area receiver’ so as to exclude form this class of receivers any receivers which are used solely for the reception of a radio ACS.
Schedule 1
3. Inserts into Schedule 1 of the Principal Regulations new items 10A and 10B to provide for new classes of licence for the provision of ACS via radio and television broadcasting networks.
Item 10A is ‘Ancillary communciations service network, Class A’ which means a network of radio
broadcasting stations used for the provision of an ACS.
Item 10B is ‘Ancillary communications service network Class B’ which means a network of television broadcasting stations used for the provision of an ACS.