By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC is asking Rogers to provide an opinion about whether returning to service providers uncommitted money from the service provider-supported Broadband Fund at the end of year would alleviate some of its concerns.
Rogers filed a Part 1 application this summer asking the regulator to review the way the National Contribution Fund (NCF) manages the program, arguing that service providers must set aside large amounts of money for collection when the fund doesn’t always deliver the amounts it has already collected, which is currently set at $150 million per year. It is asking the CRTC to change the NCF’s collection practices to prioritize the amounts that are waiting to be collected over the draw of annual scheduled amounts.
In a letter on Wednesday, the CRTC is asking for more information about how to address this issue, which has been a popular topic among providers since Bell raised the matter three years ago.
The regulator wants to know whether Rogers’s concerns would be alleviated if, in future years, it returned, when necessary, the difference between committed and uncommitted amounts back to service providers through the percentage rate charge decision at the end of the year. (The amounts to be collected are based on percentages of eligible telecom revenues.)
If that does address Rogers’s concerns, “How would this type of approach work if the Commission were to receive unplanned funding requests such as those related to change requests from ongoing or approve projects?” the CRTC asks.
“Would this approach constrain future calls for funding and if so, how should this be mitigated?” it goes on.
The CRTC has said that while it doesn’t always allocate to broadband projects all the amounts it collects from service providers, there are times when existing projects require additional money to complete builds. The regulator, in fact, rejected Bell’s original request because it needed to “maintain sufficient funds to approve additional funding requests.”
In a separate letter, the CRTC is simultaneously asking the Canadian Telecommunications Contribution Consortium Inc. (CTCC), which oversees the NCF, and Central Fund Administrator (CFA) about the feasibility of releasing those funds on an ad hoc basis, and if there are any operational or administrative barriers to doing that.
The deadline for responses from both are due December 10.
The new letters follow a similar request made by the CRTC that followed Rogers’s application.
The CRTC is currently contemplating broadening the Broadband Fund’s scope as part of a review it launched in 2023.
“The review is still ongoing over two years later and the level of appropriate annual funding of the Broadband Fund going forward remains unclear,” Rogers said in its original application. “At present, TSPs have no knowledge of how long they will continue to make contributions to the Fund and how much these contributions may be.
“Should the Commission decide to expand the Fund to cover operational costs, the Fund’s lifetime could increase far beyond its original five-year term – imposing an indefinite and very significant financial burden on TSPs and their end-customers without any decision on the final amount or on the basis of determining what, if any, new annual amounts should be collected in 2025 and future years,” the cable company added.
