AS CANADIANS CHOOSE to carry their worlds in their pockets – loaded onto their much loved and much used Androids, iPhones, BlackBerrys and so on, they are demanding service that’s always excellent and bills that are always affordable.
When things go wrong with the little device in our hands, when we get dinged for charges we didn’t expect, when it doesn’t work as fast as advertised, when it breaks, it’s a mini-disaster. It’s not like tearing a hole in your pants or getting a flat tire. Those things can be dealt with and are relatively easy to fix. When it comes to our wireless though, our very lives are in our handsets and boy, when something goes wrong, or prices rise, we Canadians are hyper-quick to anger. This is our most personal device, filled with tools and emotion, that comes (almost literally) everywhere with us. We are easily infuriated, it seems.
Politicians know this. They carry multiple devices themselves and also hear from constituents all the time how their wireless carriers are this or that and how many things must change and what is the government or the CRTC doing about it anyway?
The point man for all of this in Ottawa is Bernard Lord, the former New Brunswick Premier who just completed his fourth year at the helm of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association. His job can be viewed as a tricky one (although he says it’s exciting). Not only does he have to be the voice for a constantly innovating, ever-changing industry (and one that drives efficiency and productivity across all sectors) for the various Ottawa mandarins, he has to steer a ship where the crew, those wireless company members, are very often squabbling among themselves, pulling their own oar to their own beat.
Cartt.ca sat down with Mr. Lord (pictured) last week in Ottawa to talk wireless. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: I figure I’m like most people who remember you first as premier of New Brunswick first with your unanimous majority. I’m curious whether or not you miss politics.
Bernard Lord: Not really. People ask me that all the time, and I don’t miss it enough to go back.
GOB: No?
BL: I enjoyed it very much, and I’m glad I did it, and if I was to go back 15 years and start over, I would do it again. But, for me, that’s then; this is now. And I was happy to be given the opportunity to work for the people of New Brunswick. I love public life. I love politics. But now, I’m doing something else, which I enjoy.
GOB: This can be viewed as a political job as well.
BL: Well, it’s political, not in the same way. There’s a lot of diplomacy involved, but there is public policy issues involved as well and that’s really one of the things that I like a lot about this job – the public policy issues and the impact it has on Canadian society, on Canadian economy, productivity, innovation, which are all things that were important to me when I was premier.
These are things that I think are important for all of us. If we want to improve our living conditions, make sure that we provide a better future for our children, we need all these things. And, actually, wireless plays a critical role at this juncture of our economy in supporting more productivity innovation. If you add that to our economy, it makes us more prosperous, and that’s how we pay for health care and education. So, in that sense, all these things are connected.
GOB: You came on in 2008, so you’ve been here a full four years now. Is the job what you thought it would be, given the changes that have gone on in those four years and led by smartphones and everything else?
BL: The job is what I thought it would be, in the sense that it’s very exciting. The industry is very exciting and that’s the reason I accepted the invitation to join the CWTA was because of the industry, because of what it represents, how it’s changing our lives and changing everybody’s lives and how we communicate with family and friends, how we do business, how we keep our community safe, just how we consume and produce culture and media.
We’ve done a lot of good things in four years. We’ve been able to bring a diverse group of members together to focus on common issues. We have new entrants; we have incumbents; we have national players; we have regional players; we have handset manufacturers; we have content providers, coming together in the CWTA to work on common issues and to promote the idea that wireless makes us stronger as a country, makes our economy stronger, makes our culture stronger, makes our social programs stronger. So the job has been good. It’s a challenge. It’s not always easy trying to bring everybody to focus on these issues.
GOB: Is there something that you see as the biggest challenge of the job
BL: The ongoing one is making sure we can bring all these diverse group of people together to focus on common issues because it’s a very competitive marketplace, and they compete with each other on a daily basis. The carriers compete with each other, and the OEMs compete with each other, and the content providers compete with each other.
Now, these different groups work together, but it’s not rare for me to go online to the news and see one of our members suing another member.
GOB: Like this morning.
BL: It happens regularly, then we have executive meetings and board meetings and the people that I read about commenting on each other are sitting face to face or side by side where we have to work together on common interests and common issues.
GOB: From your point of view, does it work well? Is it difficult?
BL: I think it works really well, but it can always be better. We have launched some key initiatives in the last few years, whether it’s from our recycling program, our Amber Alert program, our Mobile Giving Foundation, the enhanced 9-1-1 service, the textED.ca program, we’ve launched a lot of programs together as an industry. The latest one’s on stolen phones. Collectively, we decided, “look, this is something we have to be involved in. We have to be part of the solution.” I brought it to our board. At first, some were reluctant, wondering, “Isn’t that the police’s job?” And, yeah, sure it is, but how can we help?
And so we bring that thinking to the board. We did our work through the summer, ended up with a solution that we thought made sense, was reasonable, and we announced it. So we get our members to focus on these issues. So can it be better? Sure.
GOB: I ask because there are some issues where your members simply do not agree, like, the 700 MHz auction…
BL: Absolutely.
GOB: Public Mobile, Mobilicity and Wind had a far different opinion than Rogers, Bell, and Telus.
BL: Even among themselves. Sometimes it’s too easy and too simple to group them as incumbents and new entrants. Sometimes, when you dig a little bit deeper, some of the new entrants agree with the incumbents, and some of the incumbents agree with other new entrants. It varies.
There are also issues where we don’t get involved at all because we can’t, it would be illegal for us to do, and we don’t.
GOB: Which ones are those?
BL: Competitive issues. We don’t get involved in pricing issues, how they set pricing, how they build their networks. They do that on their own. Those things are not discussed at our executive or at our board or even in social meetings. It’s just not discussed. Sometimes people ask us, “Why doesn’t the CWTA do this?” Sometimes, it’s simply because it would be illegal.
Take, for example, the code of conduct. Three years ago, we launched an internal CWTA code of conduct, looking at plain language and communicating simply with consumers and rights of consumers and so on but there were certain things we couldn’t talk about. For instance, early termination fees. We just can’t talk about that. The only time we can talk about it is if a government starts a proceeding, so whether it’s a provincial government with legislation, so then we can ask our members, “What do you think about Article XX in this legislation that talks about early termination fees?” But we can’t do it on our own, and we don’t.
GOB: Due to the competition laws?
BL: Exactly. So people will say, “Your code of conduct does not address the issue of early termination fees.” We know because we can’t talk about it. But now that we’ve had legislation in four provinces − and there was legislation in Ontario, that died in the order paper because of the prorogation here in Ontario − we asked the CRTC to launch a proceeding on a national code, and that seems to be lost in this discussion, is the initiative came from us. We requested it and now that we have, we can talk about early termination fees. Different members may have different points of view on that, but that’s normal.
GOB: Even among the big members − Rogers and Bell are saying, “We support the CWTA 100 percent. While Telus has submitted theirs with a few Telus tweaks to it.
BL: We don’t have to be unanimous on everything to be effective. We work with consensus. Over the four years that I’ve been here so far, most – not all – of our decisions have been consensus and unanimous at our board. There’s been a few times when they were not. I read sometimes, and I hear some of our members say they disagree with the CWTA position. That’s okay. I don’t lose sleep over that. We can’t be in agreement with all our members on everything to the point that we become ineffective.
GOB: I think the members agree that, given the importance of the industry, it is important to have a group here in Ottawa that is making sure that the wireless industry’s overall point of view is represented on Parliament Hill.
BL: Yes. That’s one thing we value here internally, is we need to provide value to our members otherwise, there’s no obligation for anyone to be a member of the CWTA. They can do their business. They can get their license from Industry Canada, get spectrum, be heard in front of CRTC if they need it. They don’t need to be a member of the CWTA. The only reason they’ll want to be a member is they feel we’re providing value for them and for the industry, and I’m convinced that we do.
It’s important for us to make sure we provide value and leadership for the organization, for the industry on the issues that we can work on so when you talk about the difference of opinions that exist on 700 MHz, for instance, and spectrum, well, I’m not surprised by that.
When we started talking about the next auction, that I made it very clear to our board that we were not going to get involved in the details of that auction because the positions were so diverse and opposed that there’s no way for us to try to construct a consensus position that we can move forward. But what we could do, and what we did, and what we’ll do again, is we constructed a position and built a consensus that we need more spectrum and, once we have that spectrum, and the government agrees that they want to release more spectrum to the wireless sector, then our members can go out and fight on how they get that spectrum and how it should be released.
We help the government and others understand why there’s a need for more spectrum. Once they make that decision, then it’s game on, and our members can go out and explain their position why spectrum should be structured one way versus another, and who should get more and why, and what are the rules, and how the bid process should take place. Knock yourself out.
I like using the analogy of a sports league where our job is to promote the sport and the league, but then the players and teams go out and play, and fight it out. They’ll develop their own brands and their own style and their own value proposition to win the game, if you will, to get market share and get consumers to sign on in their service.
Our job is to promote the league, to promote the industry and promote the idea that wireless is good for Canada, good for our economy, good for our social programs, good for our culture. So we do that.
GOB: Are we at the point though with spectrum where we need to take the next step, like what they’re doing in the States with incentive auctions of some of the spectrum TV broadcasters are still using?
BL: Whether it’s incentive auction or other measures, yes, we are at that point where we need more and what we need is for the government to lay out a comprehensive, long-term plan for spectrum. We’re more than prepared to help the government with that. I don’t want to suggest the government is not working on this. In fact, they are, and the government has started some work internally on doing a complete inventory of spectrum, trying to identify what spectrum could be released. Then the next decision is how and when it’s released.
But I believe they need to roll this out because of what we see with the growth of demand that’s happening around the world and certainly across the country. Industry Canada came out with a report this summer where they’re projecting a growth of 30 times – not 30% – 30 times growth in data consumption between was 2011 to 2016. So they know what’s coming.
In fact, I remember, going back when I first joined the industry and was learning about the industry and demand, and the growth projections that I saw four years ago have been surpassed. The expectation then was that traffic would double every year. Well, it’s doubling every six to seven months. To be able to satisfy that demand, a few things are needed. One of them is more spectrum. Right now, we can’t get around the physics.
Beyond that, we need to plan because these things are expensive. And every time the government releases spectrum, it’s billions of dollars. We don’t know exactly how much until the auction’s completed, but it’s a lot of money – and that’s just the money to have access to the spectrum. That’s not the capital investments needed to build the infrastructure and build the network and actually use the spectrum.
This is just to put your hand up and say, “I want the spectrum” and they say “Okay. You pay us a couple hundred million dollars and we’ll give you a little slice of it or more,” which adds up. Last time (the 2008 AWS auction), it was $4.3 billion. Then you need a lot of money to roll it out and implement it. These companies need time to plan these capital investments, so having what I believe would be an 8-year, 10-year, 12-year rollout plan for spectrum is what the government needs to put in place.
The government realizes that, and the indications I have received is they agree with the idea, and are doing some work. They see others, like the U.S., which has announced something similar. They’re trying to roll that out as best as they can, auction off and release spectrum and provide incentives for those that have spectrum to release it to the wireless sector.
GOB: Some of your members have been frustrated by the slow pace of the next auction that’s coming up because the US 700 MHz auction took place before you were even CWTA president. We’re a number of years behind the U.S.
BL: We are, but I would say some of our other members are actually happy that it’s taken a bit longer. There isn’t a unanimous position from our members on that point, except now, all of our members… are happy that it’s happening next year.
We don’t want to fall behind. There’s no reason for us to fall behind. We have very robust, reliable networks, fast networks. I talk to some of our equipment manufacturers who build networks around the world and one of them has told me the fastest network they built in the world is right here in Canada. So we do have the best technology, we do have the most robust networks. We have that now. We want to have that five years from now. We want to have that ten years from now.
Canadians are large consumers of communication in general and, precisely, wireless services, whether it’s voice, text, data. In terms of Smartphone connections, tablet connections, we’re among the highest in the world. To continue to satisfy that demand, is why we need more spectrum. So, we’re not behind the U.S. in terms of service at this moment − we’re behind the schedule of the U.S. in terms of auctioning off spectrum. Our government is dealing with the next step, but we can’t take the risk of falling further behind down the road.
GOB: What do you see as the CWTA’s role in educating consumers about the wireless industry? The reason I ask, of course, is because of the wireless code of conduct review. You’ve seen some of the comments from individual Canadians. I read a few myself.
I also brought along this tweet-stream of a good friend of mine that I went to high school with. I was on Twitter with him late last night and he was debating Mark Goldberg, too, so this is pretty fresh. His name is Phil. He lives in Sault Ste. Marie. He’s got a wife and two kids and is the head of security at the mall up there.
You can tell his frustration (see photo). There’s a limited number of providers where he is anyway, he uses the word, “gouging,” believes that it’s better in the States, and what they do there has no chance of happening here. Clearly, the industry is failing to get its messages through.
Are you surprised the level of vitriol there seems to be out there from Canadians towards the wireless industry? And what’s the CWTA to do to address all of that?
BL: I’m surprised at times by some of it, but it’s an ironic situation, too. There was a survey that came out recently that asked what’s the last service Canadians would let go? It’s cell phones. They’d let go their landline. They’d let go cable. They’d let go internet. If they can only pick one service, which one would they keep? Their wireless – because, with that, you can get all the other things.
I think there are still some misconceptions that linger from years past. For instance, I was at the airport waiting for my flight yesterday… I was in New Brunswick, so this gentleman recognized me, comes up to talk to me and he said, “Look, what’s the deal with three-year contracts? Why can’t I get a phone without a three-year contract?” I said to him, “You can.” To paraphrase the ad on TV, if you don’t want a three-year contract, don’t take a three-year contract. But there’s this perception with some that the only way to get cell phone service in Canada is through a three-year contract. It isn’t. It’s just the most popular choice.
What I find odd is when I hear people say, “We need to eliminate this.” Well, we’d be eliminating the most popular choice that Canadians individually select. It’s the one that Canadians pick. They can pick a two-year contract. They can pick a one-year contract. They can pick no contract at all. In fact, the way some of the companies are structuring their offers now, yes, you still have a three-year agreement, but with most of them, you can get out any time you want. You just need to pay the subsidy that you received on the phone. So, what we’re proposing as part of our code to the CRTC in effect would – even though you could still have two-year, three-year, one-year contracts, the contract becomes secondary because you can leave any time if you pay the subsidy you get on the phone.
These perceptions linger on, but I look at how people behave, not just what they write and what they say and sometimes, I find with the world of Twitter and Facebook and social media, it’s easy to get confused by what one individual says, against whether it really reflects everybody else? When you look at how people act and behave in Canada, Canadians are buying more cell phones than before… and cell phones and cell phone services is on top of the Christmas list for a lot of Canadians.
GOB: Absolutely.
BL: So they’re voting with their actions. Now, that doesn’t mean everything’s perfect. It isn’t. I think the industry and some of the players in it behaved a certain way for a while, but a lot of them have been changing. And if you look at what’s taken place in the last few years, there have been significant, profound changes in the industry and how the industry and providers deal with their customers.
This industry loves customers; they need customers; they can’t survive without customers – and there are very few industries, other than maybe electricity, in Canada that touches more people than wireless.
GOB: You can draw parallels and comparisons all over the place. I’ve got a friend who’s a retail consultant, and he hears horror stories all the time from people about terrible department store service. Car dealerships offer no money down, zero percent financing, as long as you sign that two-year lease, three-year lease, whatever it is. So these types of similar elements are all over the place. They’re not necessarily unique to the wireless industry.
BL: What maybe is unique to the wireless industry is the fact it has grown so fast and so much… and what people are consuming today is very different than what they were consuming ten years ago. Even those customers who had cell phones ten years ago, what they have today is significantly different. Twenty years ago when I bought my first cell phone, I was a young lawyer in Moncton. What I had was voice. That’s it. And I was thrilled. It was a dollar a minute.
GOB: Probably weighed more than your laptop there.
BL: It was just as big and you had to carry it in a separate case but I thought it was great. I was mobile and my clients and my staff could reach me anywhere, anytime, by phone. Wow. Then, we were able to start texting, and emails were growing on mobile devices. “Wow, this is even better. I can actually work,” I thought. Now, we can do so much more and what people are buying… really, they’re mobile computers that allow you to talk.
So this industry, even though we feel we’re selling the same thing, or people may think we are − it’s changed dramatically, the service value and the proposition is different than it was five years or 10 years or certainly 20 years ago – and all this has happened in a very short period of time. So the industry and the providers have had to adapt, and the consumers have had to adapt. This is a completely new environment that touches virtually every single family in Canada, and most families more than once.
GOB: The difference with your wireless handset over anything else that you own is this is your everything in your pocket. It’s your family; it’s your internet; it’s your shopping; it’s your phone; it’s your life. You pull it out; it’s your calendar, banking, entertainment…
Your car is just your car. You have a problem with your car, fine, you get it fixed. No big deal. You have a problem with your phone, you can’t call home. You can’t text your son. You know, you go from zero to really angry much more quickly.
BL: If you lose your phone – and it’s happened to me once; luckily, I found it – you lose your calendar; your contacts. You can have it somewhere else. But, for that moment in time, you don’t have access to it. My daughter lost her phone, and lost all her pictures that she had taken on a trip. Now, she uses cloud services, so they’re automatically stored somewhere else.
This is that one device that people depend on, and that’s why that’s the one that people care about the most. That’s why it’s the last one people want to let go.
I saw a study earlier this year that showed that 50% of people that have Smartphones use it in bed, and it’s often the last thing they look at before they go to bed.
GOB: I use mine as my alarm clock.
BL: So do I… and, at first, I thought I was alone, until I started talking to people and found out a lot do. It just shows how deeply it’s just part of our lives – and that’s why there’s a lot of opinions… This week three-year contracts has come up quite a bit and it tells me that, yes, maybe we do have a better job in making sure the consumers realize all the options that are out there.
One comment – and I see it on your friend’s tweet stream here – comes up often where people say, “they’re all priced the same,” or, “they have the same packages.” Well, that’s usually what happens in a very competitive marketplace where the price of a lot of things ends up being close to the same.
GOB: Sure. If you go from one grocery store to another, they have certain sales, end caps that are different, but if you go down the regular priced parts of the aisles, the maple syrup at Metro is usually the same price as the maple syrup at Fortinos.
BL: When you have a competitive, functioning marketplace, if one provider is consistently higher-priced than the others, nobody buys their product, unless you have a higher-value proposition, whether it’s through service, whether it’s through bundling or whether it’s the network, there can be some options. It’s the same thing with cars and computers and so on.
GOB: We talked a little bit about losing your phone. Let’s segue from there into the loss and theft file. I’m curious, you know, how much of that responsibility to protect Canadians you think rests with the carriers, versus, say, the app-makers like the banks, Facebook, versus Canadians themselves. How are you juggling all those balls and pushing that education aspect?
BL: I think the responsibility is shared. I’m a strong believer in freedom, and with freedom comes responsibility. When we want to live in a free, democratic society, we have to accept with that freedom, means we’re responsible for ourselves as well. We can’t promote freedom and ask for freedom and then ask for others to be responsible for us. It just doesn’t work.
First and foremost, responsibility’s on the individual to make sure you protect yourself and protect your device. But that being said, we live in a society where we like to co-operate and help each other out at the same time – and those value propositions are not contradictory, they’re complementary.
That means carriers have a role to play. The service providers, through apps and others, have a role to play as well. Police forces certainly have a role to play. Collectively, I think we can make the situation better to support the individual protecting themselves or protecting their family and protecting their belongings, their data and their information.
So, when someone buys a device, they have to take the first steps to protect themselves. They have to put on a password. You can’t ask the government to force people to put passwords on their phones… and there are many apps that let you eliminate the data at a distance.
GOB: That’s on my phone. If I lose it, I can wipe it.
BL: Exactly. But nobody can force you to do that. Nobody should be able to force you to do that. People need to take those steps and once they take those individual steps, then what else can we do? Well, we can make sure that we make it less attractive for people to steal phones. And that’s what our November launch was all about. That’s what our initiative is about, is making sure if someone steals a phone, they can’t just sell it the next day, and someone else can just go connect it.
So we’ll put the phones on a blacklist; use the GSMA database, and that eliminates part of the incentive. I say part because a lot of these devices work on Wi-Fi networks. The other part of that initiative is it’s all linked to the IMEI number. We want the government to make it illegal to change the IMEI number, which is different from the serial number. It’s illegal in Canada to change serial numbers on goods. Phones have serial numbers, but they also have an IMEI number and we want the government to make it illegal to change the IMEI number.
GOB: Kind of like a car’s VIN number
BL: It’s illegal to change it. And the government, I’m convinced, will do it, with the indications we have so far. he police are doing some things. We’ve launched a PSA that’s been aired, I think, more than 5,000 times so far… and we have commitments for several thousand more over the next six months. That’s just a way for people to, say, “Oh, maybe I should do something about this.” That’s really all we can do, is raise the awareness.
And once people are aware, they need to act, and they can act – we provide guidance and suggestions through our website to protect your data, so you can go there and see, “Oh, okay, I can put a password. I can download apps. I can be vigilant and make sure I call my carrier as soon as I lose it or stolen.” I don’t believe, and I’ll put that one on me – I don’t believe that it’s our role to do everything for the consumer. It’s our role to provide the tools to the consumer for the consumer to make their choices.
GOB: It makes me think about the cable industry where people would object to their kids seeing certain content on whatever channel. The cable companies get calls, and they’d tell those customers, “Well, you have parental controls in the set top box. You can put a password on there.” People just didn’t know. So maybe that’s a problem for the operator, where they have to do a better job of communicating that to their customers.
BL: I agree.
GOB: Because I’ve been in those wireless stores, and it is sell, sell, sell, sell −
BL: Of course. They all have mortgages to pay.
GOB: Exactly. But it seems there needs to be – and the CRTC was pretty impatient with the wireless industry through the summer – a little bit more of a push to really make sure at the point of sale that people know there are ways that they should be protecting themselves.
BL: The irony of what took place this summer with the CRTC is we were well on our way to announcing (the measures to combat handset loss and theft) and had everything set for September. Our plan was clear from the start.
I raised this with our board early in 2012, then in May, we had a resolution from our board where I placed a recommendation that we needed to deal with cell phone theft. We decided to create a working group, analyze what was being done around the world, consult our members and technical people to see what can be done here in Canada, and then come back with recommendations to our September board meeting. We created a working group and it came up with the recommendations that we brought to our board in September, and it was approved. That was the plan all along, and the objective was to announce it in September. Then we received this letter from the CRTC, and we ended up announcing it in November. So all that to say that our plan was clear from the start, and we’re still on track…
Yes, sometimes, we don’t tell them, or we do, but it gets lost with all the other things – and a lot of these services for consumers can be overwhelming. We deal with this every day. You write about it every day. I work with our members every day. It all seems to simple and clear to us. Everyone else has other jobs, and wireless is a tool that they use to do things in their lives and is not the dominant part of their life. This is a tool to do other things. We need to make sure they understand simply what their choices are, not make the choices for them, but making sure they know what the choices are and how to use and access and exercise their options basically.
In that sense, I think the industry and our members can do a better job. I would argue they are doing a better job than they were when I started four years ago.
GOB: What’s on your to-do list for 2013? There’s the wireless auction, the common short codes lawsuit launched in September. There are other things Canadians are worried about, too. Some think nearby cell sites are going to harm their health. There's so much.
BL: The big issues for us remain the same. We want to make sure we’re in a position to provide the services Canadians want. For that, we need more spectrum. So we have an auction coming, which is good.. But, in 2013, we need to lay the groundwork for the auctions to come beyond that. We’ve talked about that already. That’s critical.
We need more antenna sites, and there’s just no way around that, not with the technology that’s being deployed. Because of the way demand is growing and where it’s growing, we need more sites.
GOB: I’ve told the carriers they can rent the roof of my house. I’m not kidding.
BL: You’ll probably find a carrier to take you up on that offer. What’s happening is people used to use their cell phones outside the house – traveling, commuting, at work, away from home and, at home, they would use their landline. That’s when your cell phone was primarily a phone, and when it was $1 a minute or 50-cents a minute. You thought, “well, okay, I’ll walk across the room and pick up the landline rather than using the cell phone.”
Prices are so low now, and most people have hundreds of minutes and all these packages in our household if my son’s in his room, and he needs to make a call; he’s not going to pick up the landline. He’s going to pick up his mobile device and call. My daughter will be Tweeting on her phone in the house, not just from her computer − and sometimes it’s through Wi-Fi, but sometimes through the cellular network.
Close to 40% of data (on wireless handsets) is consumed in the home. When you look at the age group, 18 to 35, they’re cutting the cord. They’re not buying landlines so their phone connection is that wireless connection. So all that is to say we need sites; we need antennas. We can have all the spectrum in the world and if we don’t have antennas and sites to use the spectrum to connect to phones, it’s meaningless.
GOB: The carriers and manufacturers are being creative, too. We’ve seen those big tubular-looking crosses that they put up by churches that are cell sites.
BL: The irony is we find situations where people tell us the antennas are too visible and they ask “Can’t you do something to hide them?” The companies say, “Yes, we can.” So they came up with innovative ideas, and then people say, “Well, we didn’t know that was an antenna.” So you’re faced with dual problems with same situation from two opposite angles.
Let’s get back to 2013. The other thing that we want to be able to do to meet demand is to be able to use the same radio waves more often. If you go to Moncton, there’s a radio station that’s 88.5 FM, and here in Ottawa there’s a radio station 88.5, in Vancouver, and there’s one at 88.5. They’re all playing different music. One will be playing Acadian music; the other one’s playing the parliamentary channel; and the other one’s rock and roll. They’re all using the same frequency, but they’re so far apart that there’s no interference.
Think of that, but instead of having thousands of kilometers, just having a few kilometers in between. So I can be here, using a very precise frequency on my phone, connecting to an antenna. And somebody else two kilometers down the road is using the same thing, not communicating with me, but communicating with another antenna, so to be able to duplicate and use the spectrum more, to use the same radio waves more often, that allows us to have more volume. But to be able to do that, we need more sites. If you only have one big site, nobody can use the same frequency on that site. It’s just one at a time.
Third is smart regulation, and what we mean by that is we don’t want regulations that make it tougher for us to meet consumer demand or that end up adding cost to consumers. A very precise example: The reason we decided to ask the CRTC to adopt a national code of conduct was because we felt it was smarter regulation than having 13 sets of rules.
It may be counterintuitive for any industry to ask the government to regulate them, but we felt having one set of rules, e
The fourth thing that’s always on our minds is we don’t want more government fees. The wireless sector is one that is investing heavily and has been investing heavily for the last decade and even more so in the last five years. We project forward, and we know we’re going to make significant investments. We don’t need another barrier of government raising fees. Those fees simply add cost. When you look at the fees paid on licensing in Canada, last year it was $178 million. If we had a cost recovery model like the U.S., it would have been about $4 million. So who pays that $178? Well, ultimately, it’s passed on to the consumer.
So those are the big items we feel we need to continue to satisfy demand. What else is there on our plate? Well, in the New Year, we’re going to have the CRTC hearing on the code, we have the Competition Bureau lawsuit that’s taking some of our time and is certainly on my plate. I don’t think it’s a big item at this point for the public, in terms of service, but it is an item that we internally need to deal with.
We’ve launched some initiatives that we want to make sure we continue to support and solidify their – stabilize them and make sure they’re sustainable, from our recycling – Recycle My Cell program, the Mobile Giving Foundation, some of these initiatives that we’ve launched in the last two, three years. We want to make sure they’re sustainable and continue to grow. So that’s on our plate.
Raising the awareness on some of these initiatives, and also, improving our relationship with other key stakeholders is important for the CWTA on behalf of the industry.
One more item that ties into the last two things is we reached out to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and worked on a joint protocol. I can’t announce it today but I can simply say it was approved by our board and their board, and we’re hoping to have an announcement in early 2013.
GOB: That’s about cell sites?
BL: Yes. That’s another example how to work with municipalities and be more attentive to the needs of local communities and the impact (antenna installations) has on some local communities, the impact it has on land use authority… The rules of Industry Canada say we can do certain things like put up a tower if you satisfy certain criteria. What the new protocol says is we’ll do more. Take, for example, the 15-metre exemption. If you put up a tower that’s less than 15 meters, there’s no need for consultation under the existing rules. Part of the new protocol (with FCM) would impose on the carrier an obligation to inform the land use authority that they’re putting up an antenna or site, even if it’s under 15 metres.
If there’s a need for consultation in the eyes of the land use authority and the municipality, the carrier will proceed with a consultation, even though the Industry Canada rules say, “You don’t need to do this.” This is another example where I felt we need to go beyond. We need to take an extra step. So we reached out to FCM, said, “Look, we know your members have issues with our members. How can we work on this together?” We’ve developed this protocol and organized five wireless antenna siting forums across the country so far… with five more planned just in the next six months.
This is a way for us to reach out to our partners, reach out to people who have issues with us and just trying to figure how do we work this out?
