By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – Rogers has told the CRTC that it estimates it can take a year for it to provide third party access to its fibre-to-the-home network on newer technologies, according to a tariff letter dated last week.
When the CRTC launched its review of the wholesale internet framework in March, it said it would be expediting its proceeding on mandating third party access to the last mile fibre facilities of the incumbents under the current aggregated regime to speed up the process of driving more competition and lowering prices for higher internet speeds. The aggregated regime currently does not provide for mandated bundling of last mile fibre with transport facilities.
But in a letter accompanying a proposed tariff for aggregated last mile access, dated May 31, Rogers said despite its opposition to the temporary and expedited regime, “the operationalization of a novel regime is neither trivial nor quick.”
Rogers uses two kinds of fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) technologies, gigabit-capable passive optical network (GPON) and radio frequency over glass (RFoG). GPON is a newer technology that allows for faster internet speeds. Crucially, GPON covers the majority of FTTP addresses in Rogers’s footprint, the company said, with more deployment coming.
That means the cable company will have to deal with new realities on the information technology side for third party fibre access, it said in the tariff filing.
“In the case of TPIA-GPON, Rogers cannot develop the necessary IT systems or provisioning functionality until the configuration is set by the Commission,” the company said.
“Rogers’ initial assessment estimates that it will take approximately 12 months to integrate IT systems with its customized TPIA portal, billing systems and provisioning systems, and to establish the processes specific for TPIA-GPON wholesale access” — following tariff approval.
Those timelines don’t include work needed to construct new interconnection facilities at the point of interconnection and obtain municipal access and support structure authorization to build the facilities, it added.
“Put simply, the implementation of a brand new service such as TPIA-GPON is not a trivial matter and requires significant time to implement,” the company said.
Otherwise, implementing TPIA access on the older technology, which uses the existing systems, could be completed within 90 days after tariff approval, Rogers said.
The CRTC has said that it holds the preliminary view that third party internet service providers should have mandated access to the incumbents’ last mile fibre facilities, after it ruled that the disaggregated regime — which separated the leasing of the transport and last mile fibre — wasn’t working. But it said the disaggregated regime can exist in its current form and in the existing markets it has already been adopted in.
A month earlier, Innovation Canada said in a policy direction to the CRTC that the aggregated and disaggregated regime can exist simultaneously, opening the door to that mandated last mile fibre access.
