The CRTC on Wednesday directed Bell and Telus to each provide Quebecor and Rogers with a list of all of the locations where their FTTP services are available by March 13 and after concluding reasonable non-disclosure agreements with the parties.
This decision approves a September 2024 application from Quebecor that asked the CRTC to tell legacy telcos to disclose their lists of FTTP locations in full to Quebecor, after each of the incumbents allegedly informed Quebecor they were willing to disclose their FTTP locations in Quebec if Quebecor identified its own wireline incumbent footprint in the province.
The two incumbents had argued in interventions that they were only required to provide a list of wholesale FTTP-available locations outside of Quebecor’s traditionally served wireline territory, as those locations were where Quebecor would be eligible to access wholesale FTTP service under the final wholesale internet framework.
Rogers supported Quebecor’s request for disclosure of FTTP locations without additional conditions other than the conclusion of a reasonable NDA. Rogers indicated that Bell and Telus had made similar requests to Rogers, and it had made no progress toward concluding reasonable NDAs with the two companies as of March 28, 2025 — the date of a Rogers response to a CRTC request for information regarding Quebecor’s application.
A Telus Part 1 application made public last fall revealed some details of the Vancouver-based telecom’s dispute with Rogers over reciprocal wholesale access.
In its Wednesday decision, the CRTC said the telecom regulatory policy mandating aggregated wholesale fibre access directs incumbents to provide lists of locations where their FTTP services are available to competitors upon request and that access to those lists could be made conditional to entering into a reasonable NDA.
The commission said that, while location data can reveal insight into an incumbent’s business, reasonable NDAs provide sufficient protection to prevent misuse. And in a case where an incumbent were to provide service to an end user using the wholesale FTTP service of another incumbent within its own traditional wireline territory, an application could be filed with the CRTC to determine whether the terms of the in-territory restriction in the wholesale high-speed access (HSA) framework were violated, the CRTC said.
“To meet its objectives, the wholesale HSA framework needs to be implemented in a timely and effective manner. To that end, the Commission considers that this matter could have been resolved more effectively through the Commission’s dispute resolution process or by alternative approaches on an interim basis pending a Commission determination. For example, Bell Canada or TELUS could have met their respective obligations by providing a searchable database. The most effective solution now is to require ILECs to fully disclose the requested FTTP location lists,” the CRTC wrote in its decision.
“In addition, the Commission clarifies that the mandated disclosure of wholesale FTTP-available locations under the wholesale HSA framework is not to be made conditional on the reciprocal disclosure of the traditional serving territory of a competitor or the communities a competitor seeks to serve through the wholesale framework.”
The CRTC concluded by saying administrative monetary penalties against Bell and Telus are not warranted in this matter.
Bell and Telus did not respond to a request for comment.
