George Hariton and Peter Milne
Open Access in Network Industries

This study reviews policies introduced to open up the Canadian long distance and local 
telecommunications and natural gas industries to greater competition and considers the relevance of these measures to the railway industry. In telecommunications, access has taken two forms: (1) interconnection and (2) resale of facilities and functionalities. The analogous concepts in rail transport are interswitching and competitive line rates (interconnection) and running rights (resale). In the long distance telecommunications market, where open access has been in effect for some time, competition has flourished and price rivalry is intense. Even so, the effect of access in terms of overall economic performance is still a matter of controversy. In the local market, competition is still in the early stages, and the effect of open access is harder to assess. Access in the context of natural gas is less directly applicable to rail. The main emphasis to date has been 
on unbundling ownership of the gas from its carriage. By contrast, railways have traditionally provided only the transport function, unbundled from ownership of the commodities being carried. While pipelines interconnect with each other, gas transport has become competitive only recently, with the construction of an alternative pipeline system. Nor has consideration been given to allowing competitors to use each other's capacity directly or to operate any aspect of another company's pipeline.