OTTAWA — The Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) and the National Pensioners Federation (NPF) filed Monday a petition to the Governor in Council (i.e., cabinet) to reverse the CRTC’s decision in March denying PIAC-NPF’s request to require Telus’s flanker brand Koodo Mobile to provide paper bills to customers upon request.
Starting in April 2018, Koodo Mobile began changing most of its existing customers’ monthly bills from paper to electronic format.
“Canadian consumers deserve a paper bill if they want or need one,” said John Lawford, executive director and general counsel of PIAC, in the news release. “The CRTC and…
Continue Reading
By Steve Faguy
MONTREAL — Evanov Radio has pulled the plug on its only French-language station, Montreal’s CHRF 980 AM, which it admits “never really got off the ground” and was draining millions of dollars from the company.
Carmela Laurignano, vice-president and radio group manager, lays some of the blame with the CRTC, saying the Commission’s failure to accept its frequency swap plan for its Toronto stations prevented it from getting enough additional revenue to keep subsidizing the station.
CHRF launched in 2015 after a competitive proceeding in 2011 to award licences for two clear-channel AM frequencies in Montreal. Evanov won neither,…
Continue Reading
By Denis Carmel
GATINEAU – While a National Post consumer reporter shared his story of having his phone number ported against his will last week, the next day, coincidentally, the CRTC sent a request for information to wireless providers asking them further information on that very subject.
At the beginning of this “process” (although it’s not an official CRTC proceeding at this point) the Public Interest Advocacy Centre had voiced its reservations about the nature of this exercise, asking for a public hearing.
In effect, this started in January 2020 with a CRTC staff letter (not a notice initiating a…
Continue Reading
By Denis Carmel
GATINEAU – Saying it is suffering from an asymmetrical marketplace, Shaw filed an application to the CRTC on May 27th, requesting interim relief from having to offer access to its network to resellers, at mandated rates while Telus and Bell/MTS have no such obligations for their higher speed offerings.
The application was filed the same day the company launched its Fibre+ Gig service, across 99% of their network.
“Five years have now passed since the last review of the Commission’s wholesale wireline framework and ILECs’ fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) services continue to enjoy a regulatory holiday from mandated HSA requirements….
Continue Reading
GATINEAU — On Monday, the CRTC initiated a proceeding to examine the offer and promotion of accessible wireless plans by wireless service providers and the extent to which these plans meet the needs of Canadians with various disabilities.
All retail wireless service providers are required to offer accessible wireless plans and to promote those plans in ways that are accessible, including through stores, websites and customer service representatives.
The aim of the proceeding, however, is to look at how wireless service providers are complying with these requirements, whether differences exist between primary and flanker brands, whether the plans currently offered and…
Continue Reading
GATINEAU — The CRTC now says it will expedite an application made by Rogers to review and vary the Commission’s decision in April which gave Bell more time to deploy one-way toll-free (TF) trunks between the two companies’ networks, as part of an ongoing dispute over toll-free call routing.
When the Commission posted the R&V application filed by Rogers to its website on May 27, it set June 26, 2020 as the deadline for interventions. The following day on May 28 in a procedural letter, the Commission revised the deadline to June 8 for interested parties to respond…
Continue Reading
OTTAWA – In August of 2019, the CRTC designated a new English-language closed captioning mandatory quality standard relating to the accuracy rate for live television programming and put the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council in charge of what’s known as the Canadian NER Evaluation Guidelines.
(The NER model is based on (1) the Number of words, (2) ‘Edition’ errors, where a difference arises from a choice made by the captioner to paraphrase the verbatim speech, and (3) ‘Recognition’ errors, where the captioner, or the software used by the captioner, delivers a caption word that is wrong, misspelled, or garbled, according…
Continue Reading
Regional carriers acknowledge opportunity exists, though
By Greg O’Brien
TORONTO – It was heartening to hear from a handful of the top Canadian telecom executives on Wednesday when they detailed how their companies have, admirably, responded to the Covid-19 crisis.
Suspensions of overage fees, no disconnects, working with businesses and consumers to defer payments or re-do packages to help as they struggle financially, serious progress on remote health (especially by Telus), self-installs, employees working from home, networks which have remained robust and resilient, and charitable contributions too numerous to count, it has been an 11-week stretch like none of us have ever…
Continue Reading
By Brad Danks
IN A SERIES OF RECENT ARTICLES, former CRTC commissioners, Konrad von Finckenstein, Peter Menzies and Timothy Denton have all criticized the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel Report (also called the “Yale Report”) for one of its key recommendations – bringing all media communications entities under the jurisdiction of the Broadcasting Act.
This is the recommendation intended to include all online services, such as Netflix and similar foreign online streamers, within the Canadian broadcasting regulatory system.
Each of the former commissioners’ objections is slightly different, but all follow two similar themes. The first is the Internet is “free” and…
Continue Reading
By Ken Kelley
TORONTO – Cogeco president and CEO Philippe Jetté said Wednesday he believes the company’s own network advancements are the key to helping fend off Bell’s fibre expansion throughout southern Ontario.
Jetté (above) told the TD Securities Telecom and Media Conference (held online), the company isn’t yet seeing any material impact stemming from Bell’s Fibe rollout in cities like Hamilton, where the two are in direct competition with one another.
“In terms of overlap, Bell isn’t moving fast,” Jetté said. “We’ve seen them take 1% of the fiber-based network. We aren’t too concerned about their progress in these areas, as…
Continue Reading
