By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC is directing the country’s legacy telcos on Tuesday to modify their tariffs to address certain issues surrounding corrective and make-ready work to hasten access by third parties to their telephone poles.
The commission ordered Bell, Telus and SaskTel to amend their tariff pages to ensure both make-ready and corrective are on the same timeline for completion and be scheduled together to minimize third party attachment delays. Make-ready is the work involved in preparing the pole for a new attachment and corrective work deals with things like meeting construction standards.
On the matter of simple work, such as trimming trees, and complex work, such as those “reasonably likely to cause a service outage or facility damage,” the regulator said those work projects should remain on their respective timeline tracks set by the commission in February 2023, but be scheduled simultaneously (at the lowest end, 40 days for simple and 60 for complex for 20 poles and fewer, all the way up to 100-plus days for 201 poles or more).
But the CRTC is also giving some leeway for workarounds in the case of complex work that doesn’t need to be done immediately. “For situations where a workaround solution is possible, the attacher will not have to wait for the completion of the complex work, and in situations where a workaround solution is not possible, starting both types of work simultaneously will allow more efficiency and a reduced timeline overall,” the commission said in its decision.
The commission is also instituting a 30-day time limit for the attacher to decide whether or not to carry out the simple make-ready work itself or through an approved contractor so as to avoid an “abuse of the process.”
“The Licensee [attacher] shall inform the Company [telco] of its decision whether or not to perform the Make-Ready Work within thirty (30) days from the receipt of the Make-Ready Work estimate,” the decision said. “Once the Licensee has confirmed to the Company its decision to carry out the Make-Ready Work, the Licensee shall complete it within sixty (60) calendar days for projects involving fewer than 200 poles, or sixty-five (65) calendar days for projects involving 200 poles or more.”
The CRTC established that option in its February 2023 decision, when it determined that third party attachers should not bear the full brunt of the costs to replace the pole when they want to latch on. That decision also established a one-touch make-ready (OTMR) regime, which would allow the pole owners and attachers to do make-ready work on the facilities on behalf of other parties that already have attachments on the pole. Again, all in an effort to speed up the process.
In that decision, the CRTC directed the telcos to provide detailed reasoning to the attacher and to the commission “when denying an application due to a lack of spare capacity.”
The CRTC said Tuesday the telco “cannot decline to replace a pole, at its own cost, if the lack of spare capacity to accommodate a new attachment is a result of the requirement to complete corrective work … If the removal or rearrangement of facilities would create additional new Spare Capacity sufficient to accommodate the access request at issue, then the Company will not deny the application and will remove or rearrange them, or will allow for their removal or rearrangement by a third party, as part of Make-Ready Work and at the sole expense of the Licensee requesting the attachment.”
The telcos have until February 27 to file final tariff pages with those amendments.
The CRTC also said it will not decide whether to make interim the rates to attach to those poles. In light of the CRTC’s decision to shift cost of replacing poles back onto the owner, Bell had requested in the spring of 2023 that the CRTC make the attachment rate interim in Ontario and Quebec until it could update its cost studies to factor the decision.
The regulator said Tuesday it will take up that issue when it comes around to Bell’s application on that.
Photo via Xplore
