CHATHAM, ON — Independent ISP TekSavvy is urging Canadians to voice their support for the CRTC’s decision in August to lower Internet prices by visiting its new website, called paylesstoconnect.ca, and writing their federal member of parliament.
In a news release Monday, TekSavvy amped up its fight against incumbent telcos and cablecos, who have petitioned the federal cabinet to cancel the CRTC’s decision and obtained a stay of the decision from the courts (an earlier temporary stay was granted in October by the FCA). The incumbent have since filed review and vary applications with the CRTC in December.
In August 2019, the Commission had set new wholesale high-speed access rates that the large cable and telephone companies are able to charge competitors who lease space on incumbent networks.
“The CRTC found Big Telcos broke its rules and fabricated costs to inflate their rates for competitors, keeping prices high for Canadians. During its 4-year rate-setting process, the CRTC condemned the Big Telcos’ Internet rate-fixing as ‘very disturbing’, lowering their rates and ordered them to repay overbilled amounts back to March 2016 (estimated at $325 million),” TekSavvy writes in its news release.
The Federal Court of Appeal’s stay of the CRTC’s August decision meant the retroactive payments set out in the summer decision are suspended and the rates in force today are the interim ones set in 2016, not the more recent ones proposed in October by the Commission.
“The Big Telcos game the system with impunity, kneecapping competitors while Canadians pay the price,” said Andy Kaplan-Myrth, TekSavvy’s vice-president of regulatory and carrier affairs. “Cabinet should not only reject their Internet price hike petitions, but hold the Big Telcos accountable for their anti-competitive activities while the CRTC opens up the mobile sector to wholesale competition, too.”
Janet Lo, vice-president of privacy and consumer legal affairs for TekSavvy, added: “When Big Telcos game the system, we all pay more. Canadians have been clear that they expect lower prices and more choices to stay connected.”
When asked by Cartt.ca to respond to TekSavvy’s news release today, Bell spokesperson Marc Choma wrote in an email: “Resellers invest little to nothing in networks, they want to reduce the rates they pay carriers that do invest to levels below what it costs to actually build and maintain the infrastructure, and they would also like carriers to in effect pay them to not invest by issuing them retroactive rebates. Now that’s disturbing.”
