Telco says it did not receive any wholesale orders in Quebec
By Ahmad Hathout
Telus is asking the CRTC for a four-month extension to provide competitor access to its last-mile fibre network in British Columbia and Alberta.
The Vancouver-based telecom said in a review-and-vary application made public Wednesday that — after two months of work on the framework since the August decision mandated that access — “it will be impossible to implement an automated and reliable system” by the current deadline of February 13, 2025. It is asking for that to be extended to June 13.
“TELUS’ implementation work so far has made clear that the current deadline of six months will harm the reseller and end-user experience and that TELUS needs until June 13, 2025 to implement the technology required to give effect” to the CRTC’s August 13 decision, which expanded competitor access to the bundled fibre networks of the incumbent telephone companies including and beyond Ontario and Quebec. The CRTC set the interim rates for that access on Friday.
The telco said the systems will not be fully automated by the original deadline, and not extending it will mean the wholesalers leasing the capacity from its network will “need to execute these processes manually, resulting in a resource-intensive, error-prone, and time-consuming processes that will hurt the reseller experience and create friction for end users.”
It added that this constitutes a “change in circumstances or facts since the decision,” which is one reason for the CRTC to amend the order.
Telus says in its application that the CRTC’s decision ignored its uncontradicted evidence submitted during the proceeding that it would need to build entirely new systems to implement the decision. “TELUS has unique systems to support FTTP high-speed access services that cannot be accommodated by the present platforms and systems interfaces used to support the wholesale Internet ADSL Service,” it cited itself as saying. “TELUS’ operations support systems and business support systems (OSS/BSS) for its fibre high-speed access services is entirely different to the systems that support copper-based [FTTN] access.”
An extension would allow the telecom “to automate many of the manual processes that would otherwise be needed to operate and access its aggregated [fibre-to-the-premises] service,” Telus said in its application, adding it has had to delay several projects to assign employees to work on implementing said systems.
But it also said it cannot hire more employees to speed up the implementation.
The telecom said the CRTC’s decision did not explain why it implemented the same six-month timeline for a national rollout as it ordered in the limited one for Ontario and Quebec, even though the former increased the scale “tenfold.”
“Instead, [the decision] simply reiterated the reasoning in the Interim Decision that the ILECS have ‘extensive experience in deploying aggregated HSA over FTTN,’” Telus said, referring to the previous wholesale mandate on older technology.
Telus bolsters its argument by comparing its circumstances to Bell’s. While Bell has been forced since 2015 to provide access to its last-mile fibre facilities on a disaggregated basis — where the middle- and last-mile facilities are unbundled — no such mandate was imposed on Telus, so it doesn’t have the experience, it said.
When Telus was forced to implement the aggregated framework in Quebec, it said it required only manual systems because it only had to serve a small area, which meant smaller order volumes. It added it knew it was able to construct a manual system for that framework within six months.
“TELUS anticipated low demand in its Quebec serving territory, and since TELUS has not received any orders from resellers to date, it has had no need to develop more robust or scalable systems,” it said in the application. “Manual support systems are not workable for the implementation of an aggregated FTTP service in TELUS’ serving areas in Alberta and British Columbia, which cover approximately ten times as many premises as TELUS’ serving area in Quebec and where TELUS anticipates much greater demand.”
