By Denis Carmel
MONTREAL – In a news release issued on Friday, Quebecor claims it won a CRTC-adjudicated dispute in which the company alleged Bell had engaged in undue preference when packaging Bell Media’s sports channel RDS and Quebecor’s TVA Sports for Bell TV customers.
“In a letter sent to the parties earlier this week, which has been kept confidential to protect strategic information, the CRTC stated that Bell’s proposed new packaging structure still fails to comply with the decision issued in December 2019. The latest CRTC decision is yet another indication of Bell’s bad faith and the anti-competitive practices it…
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By Greg O’Brien
GATINEAU – The federal government’s Competition Bureau was a rather prominent player during the now 16-months long CRTC process reviewing the regulations governing the wireless market in Canada.
UPDATE, Aug. 7: Please see the bottom of this story for an update from the Competition Bureau.
Last year the Bureau fought the carriers and the Commission for access to confidential data from Canadian wireless companies so it could do its own “objective economic analysis” of the market, telling the Commission in 2019 the “information that we are seeking is critical to our ability to make an evidence-based submission…
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GATINEAU — Iristel has filed a complaint with the CRTC alleging Rogers has been manipulating caller ID information for some of its retail mobile subscribers to make it appear as though calls are originating from the United States, which Iristel claims gives Rogers an undue preference.
According to Iristel’s Part 1 application, posted to the Commission’s website on Monday, Iristel believes the alleged scheme is “designed to circumvent routing arrangements between companies who are Local Exchange Carriers (LECs) and some of their international partners,” and would allow Rogers “to benefit from termination rates that are more advantageous than those they…
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By Denis Carmel
GATINEAU – Bell Canada has told the CRTC independent payphone provider AFX Communications is not playing by the rules.
AFX is a Quebec-based competitive pay telephone service provider (CPTSP) and as such receives payment for toll-free calls made from its pay phones. Last month, AFX filed its own complaint with cabinet to challenge a CRTC ruling over its levels of payment.
In a new submission to the CRTC, Bell Canada alleges AFX is not playing by the rules. “We have uncovered evidence that raises strong concerns about the legitimacy of the volume of toll-free calls made over AFX…
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By Greg O’Brien
VANCOUVER – As expected, Telus executives said their company is very well positioned to weather whatever storm the newly launched Shaw Mobile releases into the Albert and British Columbia telecom marketplace.
Pointing to its long-term track record, relationships with its customers and solid distribution channels (Telus has 300-plus retail stores in the two provinces compared to 19 for Shaw, although the latter does have additional retail partners like Wal-Mart), company executives on its second quarter results conference call with financial analysts on Friday sounded pretty confident they have prepared well for this new competitive brand.
“We’ve been…
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By Steve Faguy
MONTREAL — The CRTC decided today it has had enough of the long history non-compliance from two Quebec radio stations and refused to renew their licenses, ordering them to cease broadcasting by Aug. 31.
The decisions released Friday affect CJMS 1040 AM, a country music station licensed to the Montreal suburb of Saint-Constant, and CFOR-FM 99.3, a rock station in Maniwaki, a small town north of Gatineau. In both cases, the Commission cited the stations’ repeated failure to comply with their conditions of licence and said it had little confidence that they would comply with them…
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By Denis Carmel
GATINEAU – In May, Eastlink challenged CRTC Telecom Order 2020-660 issued in February where the Commission denied a request from Eastlink to impose customer credit limits that would help Eastlink mitigate delinquent third party internet access customers.
The Halifax-based company filed the application requesting the CRTC review and vary the decision, in light of the pandemic and the financial situation the crisis has created.
After requests for information and procedural requests, the final deadline to file intervention was pushed back to July 24.
In interventions, Shaw and Videotron agreed with Eastlink saying the Commission was wrong in denying…
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OTTAWA and STERLING, Va. — The Canadian Secure Token – Governance Authority (CST-GA) announced today it selected Sterling, Va.-based Neustar Information Services as its Secure Telephone Identity Policy Administrator (STI-PA) and Certification Authority (STI-CA) as a first step toward implementation of STIR/SHAKEN call authentication to combat nuisance and fraud calls in Canada.
STIR/SHAKEN stands for Secure Telephony Information Revisited/Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs, and it is a framework of interconnected technology standards that supports authentication of incoming calls and offers a level of assurance that a call is from a legitimate person, business or government agency.
Neustar is…
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OTTAWA — Canada’s wireless incumbents are continuing their lobbying efforts against potential CRTC regulation that may grant mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) access to their networks.
Their case was put forward in a piece authored by Robert Ghiz, president and CEO of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA), which appeared in The Hill Times today, a day after the federal government made headlines with its new wireless pricing tracker.
The article backs up the industry’s arguments against mandated MVNOs by citing a recent two-part study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which we reported on here and here. (The study was…
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OTTAWA — As part of the federal government’s stated commitment to help reduce the cost of some wireless plans by 25% over the next two years, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada Navdeep Bains today released data showing how prices have not yet declined for the data plans the department has chosen to study.
Over the next two years, the federal government expects the three major wireless providers and their flanker brands, which together represent 90% of the national market, to offer data plans in the 2 GB to 6 GB range that are 25% cheaper than they…
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