CRTC staff said in a letter last week to Rogers that it is suspending consideration of the cable company’s Part 1 application for an immediate temporary stay of the speed-matching requirement for its recently introduced retail gigabit internet services until Rogers files proposed wholesale tariffs for the new speed tiers.
Rogers filed its interim stay request on July 25, the same day it launched its new gigabit services to retail customers. However, it has not yet filed a tariff application to introduce these new speed tiers at the wholesale level, the commission notes in…
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The CRTC on Monday approved on an exceptional basis a request from Northwestel Inc. to use a portion of the Broadband Fund funding previously allocated to its fibre project in Northwest Territories to rebuild a fibre-to-the-home network in the NWT community of Enterprise, which was damaged by wildfires in August 2023.
The commission has also approved a modified completion date for the project, giving Northwestel an additional year to complete it, since the rebuild is anticipated to begin in 2025.
The Enterprise network is part of a larger project approved for Broadband Fund money in…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Rogers is asking for the CRTC’s assistance in breaking an impasse in which the cable company and the city of Ottawa cannot come to an agreement on certain terms for a new municipal access agreement (MAA).
The parties have been working since their previous 10-year MAA expired at the end of 2020 to resolve particular issues related to matters primarily centered on the cost of relocation.
Rogers writes in its Part 1 application, made public on Friday, that the parties have agreed on many terms of the new MAA, including that relocation costs – with some exceptions – should…
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By Len St-Aubin, a policy consultant who has worked for clients including Netflix, and was a member of the policy teams that developed the 1991 Broadcasting Act and the 1993 Telecommunications Act
Online streaming has been the goose that laid the golden egg for original Canadian made-for-TV drama, comedy and documentaries, increasing production and budgets and winning global audiences.
Now the government and regulator are out to kill the goose. With the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) and the CRTC’s June 4 policy decision 2024-121, they are determined to apply to online streaming outdated and intrusive regulation that risks undermining CanCon’s…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Iristel is claiming that the CRTC made a mistake by not committing to investigating whether Bell contravened its tariff by allegedly refusing to add a point of presence in northern Quebec that would have allowed the far north service provider to move more call traffic.
The CRTC last month ordered Iristel to pay overdue bills to Bell and its subsidiary Northwestel – which is in the midst of being acquired by an indigenous consortium – after it found Iristel was not in the right to withhold funds on what it perceived to…
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The CRTC in a decision last week denied an April 2023 application from a group of six public interest organizations asking the commission to accelerate the payment of tangible benefits allocated to the Broadcasting Participation Fund (BPF) as part of the CRTC’s March 2022 approval of Rogers’s acquisition of Shaw’s broadcasting assets.
The group behind the application included the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, the Forum for Research and Policy in Communications, the Consumers’ Association of Canada (Manitoba), the Consumers Council of Canada, Option Consommateurs, and the Union des Consommateurs.
In its Continue Reading
The CRTC has approved the transfer of ownership and effective control of Indie88 (CIND-FM) to Local Radio Lab Inc. from Rock 95 Broadcasting Ltd., a subsidiary of Central Ontario Broadcasting.
The commission says it will issue a new broadcasting licence to Local Radio Lab to continue operating the Toronto alternative music station under the same terms and conditions as those currently in effect. The new licence will expire Aug. 31, 2026.
As part of its decision to approve the transaction, the commission requires Local Radio Lab to pay $500,203 in tangible benefits, to be paid in equal installments…
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Court opines on meetings between the regulator and the regulated
By Ahmad Hathout
The Federal Court of Appeal has ruled this week that the CRTC has discretion in determining the method it uses to establish wholesale internet access rates, rejecting TekSavvy’s argument on appeal that the regulator failed to institute any method or technique when it rejected its own proposed lower wholesale rates based on methodological errors.
The CRTC had initially proposed significantly lower wholesale rates in a 2019 decision, which would have allowed independent service providers like TekSavvy to lease internet space from the larger players at a reduced cost. But…
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The CRTC has approved an application from the CBC to exclude programming expenditures on the public broadcaster’s coverage of the Olympic and Paralympic Games from the calculation of its regulatory obligations relating to Canadian programming expenditures (CPE) and expenditures on programs of national interest (PNI).
In its Tuesday decision, the commission said it is granting the relief to CBC’s licensed English- and French-language audiovisual services with the recognition that CBC would have difficulty meeting its overall programming objectives and requirements if the application was denied, which would most likely result in the broadcaster reallocating spending currently slated…
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Regulator said it believes Corus’s Global should receive ILNF funding
By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC is asking the public whether it should modify the Independent Local News Fund (ILNF) to expand eligibility, ensure news quality, and whether it should favour recipients operating in remote and underserved communities.
The commission launched Tuesday the consultation on revisiting the ILNF, which was spawned in 2016. It follows the regulator’s decision, as part of the Online Streaming Act, to force foreign and standalone online platforms to allocate five per cent of their prior year’s Canadian revenues toward content funds, including 1.5 per cent to the ILNF,…
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