Cable / Telecom News

Cable raps CRTC for deadline extension


FIVE OF Canada’s biggest cable companies have complained to the CRTC for extending a filing deadline – two days after the deadline had already passed.

Calling it “both unprecedented and unacceptable”, the heads of regulatory affairs from Bragg Communications, Cogeco Cable, Rogers Communications, Shaw Communications and Quebecor Media on behalf of Videotron, (collectively, the Cable Carriers), sent a sternly worded letter to CRTC Secretary General Robert Morin on Thursday expressing their collective “deep frustration” with Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2009-261-4

“…The Cable Carriers want the Commission to understand the deep frustration that the companies feel at having made employees cancel vacations, work through nights and weekends all in naught because they could have taken another 8 days to respond,” the letter reads. “The Commission will recall that the Cable Carriers had requested a date of September 11th as the deadline but were rejected by the Commission in favour of an August 31, 2009 date.”

The Commission said in the notice that it had amended dates for the proceeding to consider the appropriateness of mandating certain wholesale high-speed access services in response to a request from Telus Communications.

The cable ops also raised the question of “potential prejudice” while requesting clarification of the notice.

Paragraph two of the notice reads “To the extent that parties have already filed their responses, they may file with the Commission and serve on all parties supplementary responses by 8 September 2009”

But the cable companies have asked the CRTC to clarify and confirm that the ‘supplementary responses’ are only in regard to answers that were not already submitted to the CRTC and distributed to other parties on August 31, 2009 “due to the length of time needed in obtaining the necessary information”.

“The Commission simply cannot mean that parties can use this additional time to read the interrogatory responses that they have now received from other parties and then revise their responses and resubmit a new response”, the letter continues. “To permit this would be patently unfair to those parties who made the necessary effort to comply with the stated deadline. The Commission is well aware that the vast majority of answers were submitted to the CRTC and widely distributed by most parties, but not by all parties. In addition, parties that were forthcoming in their answers would be at a great disadvantage versus those that were more circumspect or made wide-ranging confidentiality claims.”