A new Commerce Commission report has stressed that self-regulation of Mobile Termination Rates, or MTRs, will be apt to cut back calling and texting rates for customers and hurdles to competition for new entries to the market.

Steven Joyce, the Communications and IT Minister, has now called for submissions on the latest report, which looks into whether or not the Government's regulation of MTRs is required. MTRs are the fees charges by network operators to each other, when calls or text messages are forwarded from a competitor's network onto their own.

The Commission's report recommended that Minister Joyce should accept the final undertaking that were recently put forward by Telecom and Vodafone, under which, the companies have promised to pull back MTRs over the coming few years.

Both the firms said that they would pull back the calling cost termination rates by 50%, to a mere 6 cents by 2014, and text termination rates would be cut back to zero, assuming that traffic between them would be "in balance".

In the report, Telecommunications Commissioner Ross Patterson said that the undertakings complied with the Telecommunications Act 2001 and were preferable to regulation.