OTTAWA – National media folks have written this morning that “big telco” rose up to defend itself yesterday in front of the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology which met again Thursday to discuss wholesale usage-based billing.
We listened in – and to be honest took few notes. There was nothing said by the likes of MTS Allstream, CAIP, OpenMedia, Bell and Shaw that we have not heard many, many times already – be it over the past number of days, or dating back months to prior CRTC hearings.
(And we still believe UBB has now become a poisonous issue – and a practice ISPs should probably abandon)
Shaw came armed with a helpful chart that showed MPs a bit of how the network worked and how third party Internet providers use the Shaw network and noted – as many network owners already have – “as third party internet access users and our retail customers consume more and more capacity, network congestion slows speeds for all customers on the network,” said Ken Stein, Shaw’s SVP, corporate and regulatory affairs.
Bell’s Mirko Bibic, SVP regulatory and government affairs, also talked network congestion and re-stated that the CRTC’s UBB decision affects but a tiny subsection of heavy internet users who are customers of independent ISPs such as TekSavvy.
He also hammered home the point about fairness – how “there should be no discrimination between retail and wholesale customers” when it comes to billing and since Bell has UBB for its retail customers, passing it on to the wholesalers is what’s fair.
MPs, on the other hand, saw another easy political target (this time, Bell) and teed off, saying Bell and the others were acting like monopolies and stifling innovation, a point also made by the representatives from OpenMedia, the Canadian Network Operators Consortium, CAIP and others at the meeting.
– Greg O’Brien
