Pursuant to the powers vested upon it by Executive Order 546 and the Public Service Act, as amended, and in order to achieve a healthy and competitive paging service and other similar services in the country, the National Telecommunications Commission hereby promulgates the following rules and regulations:

1.      Any telephone exchange carrier shall be required to provide trunklines and other interrelated telephone facilities to all paging operators on a timely and adequate basis as needed by said paging operators; Likewise, a telephone exchange carrier shall be prohibited from engaging in any form of discrimination, direct or indirect, in the granting of PSTN trunklines for the purpose of allowing any competitive and/or favorable advantage of one particular paging operator over another including without limiting the generality thereof, equal accessibility to/from its PSTN network;

2.      Timely basis as referred to in the next preceding paragraph shall mean a forty five (45) day period from the time the local telephone service provider has received the application for trunklines, within which, the local telephone service provider shall provide the needed trunkline facilities;

3.      The same rules shall also apply to other telecommunications services similarly situated;

4.      Violation of any of the foregoing provisions shall be dealt with accordingly;

5.      All orders, circulars, rules and regulations which are inconsistent herewith are hereby repealed, superseded, or modified accordingly;

6.      This circular shall take effect fifteen (15) days following its publication in a newspaper of general circulation and fifteen (15) days after its three (3) certified true copies have been filed with the University of the Philippines Law Center.

Adopted: 15 Apr. 1993

(Sgd.) SIMEON L. KINTANAR
Commissioner