GATINEAU – City Wide Communications, a Dartmouth, N.S.-based independent telecommunications service provider, has asked the CRTC to review and vary its recent decision to deny City Wide’s 2020 application asking the Commission to order Bragg Communications (Eastlink) to move its third-party Internet access (TPIA) point of interconnection (POI) in Nova Scotia from its current location in the rural community of Pennant Point to a location in the core of Halifax.
In a decision issued on March 25, 2022, the Commission noted it found “that while Eastlink is subjecting City Wide to a disadvantage and providing itself with a corresponding advantage by means of its point of interconnection location, this disadvantage is not undue or unreasonable.”
City Wide, however, is arguing in its application to review and vary the decision, which was posted to the CRTC’s website today, that the decision has “fatal errors of mixed fact and law” and that there has been a “fundamental change in circumstances since the decision.”
Among the changes in circumstances is a new site – a third candidate location for Eastlink’s TPIA POI – that “was revealed through disclosure of information that Eastlink previously filed in confidence.” The focus of City Wide’s 2020 application was on two other candidate locations. It was also later revealed Eastlink was reducing its reliance on those candidate locations, according to City Wide’s review and vary application.
The service provider is asking the CRTC to direct Eastlink to “re-locate its TPIA POI to the New Site within six months of the Commission’s decision” and to “refrain from charging wholesale customers any fees or charges associated with their migration to the new POI.”
Should the Commission decide the new site is not suitable, City Wide is asking for an order that would see the CRTC “regulate Eastlink’s transport services to Pennant Point to ensure that the services are subject to just and reasonable rates, consistent with Subsection 27(1) of the Act.”
In its application, City Wide argues the costs of transport and transit services at Eastlink’s “Pennant Point TPIA POI constitute a significant barrier to competition and the delivery of competitive Internet access services to consumers,” despite the CRTC’s conclusion to the contrary.
The service provider claims, “Eastlink’s supra-competitive pricing for transport and transit services (respectively priced 159% and 486% higher than equivalent services from alternate suppliers in central Halifax) and prolonged service ordering and processing delays have the exclusionary and anticompetitive effect of raising Eastlink’s rivals’ costs.”
The company further claims “Eastlink’s inflated pricing of its monopoly transport services to the Pennant Point TPIA POI have increased City Wide’s costs by approximately 12 percent.”
City Wide included the report An Economic Study of the Transport Costs Issues in Telecom Order CRTC 2022-79 from economist Dr. Zhiqi Chen with its application. According to the application, the report shows “careful economic analysis of the evidence does not support the Commission’s conclusion that the cost of Eastlink’s transport services to the Pennant Point POI have not been a significant barrier to competition and the delivery of competitive Internet access services to consumers.”
City Wide also argues the CRTC needs to look at a broader data set of subscriber numbers than it did when making its decision.
The CRTC considered City Wide’s net subscriber additions between 2018 and 2020, however, the service provider argues a data set including numbers from 2015 to 2021, makes it “quickly apparent that the magnitude of City Wide’s annual growth was drastically lowered by # (the number is redacted as it is considered to be commercially sensitive) in 2018 – the year that City Wide first transitioned to Eastlink’s TPIA services,” its application says.
The deadline to submit an intervention on City Wide’s review and vary application is July 28, 2022.
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