$7 billion needed to get to everyone, everywhere
OTTAWA – The federal government must adopt policies and alter regulatory frameworks and wireless spectrum allocation rules in order to clear a path for smaller, independent telecom service providers to expand the reach of broadband networks in rural and remote regions of the country, according to a Parliamentary committee.
Tabled in the House of Commons on Tuesday by the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, Broadband Connectivity in Rural Canada: Overcoming the Digital Divide recommends a number of actions the Liberals could take to improve broadband deployment in Canada’s underserved communities.
The…
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REGINA – The communities of Nekaneet First Nation, Poundmaker Cree Nation, and Sweetgrass First Nation now have access to faster internet having been upgraded to SaskTel’s interNET Extended 5 service with download speeds of up to 5 Megabits per second (Mbps), which is more than triple what had been available.
“These upgrades further illustrate SaskTel’s commitment to provide modern communication services to all residents of our province,” said Doug Burnett, Acting SaskTel President and CEO. “Since June 2017, we’ve brought faster internet service to 27 Indigenous communities in our province and plan to upgrade more communities before the end…
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GATINEAU – The CRTC today invited Canadians “to share their opinions on applications received to operate a multilingual, multi-ethnic channel with mandatory distribution across Canada.”
In May of last year, the Commission approved a request by Rogers Media to turn its struggling OMNI local OTA stations into regional, must carry specialty channels, complete with a subscriber fee of $0.12 per subscriber per month.
The Commission granted OMNI that status under the provisions of section 9(1)(h) of the Broadcasting Act (Rogers had all but said it would close the multilingual, multi-ethnic OMNI stations without that Commission decision), but…
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OTTAWA – At the Women in Communications and Technology Awards held in Ottawa Monday night, CRTC vice-chair broadcasting Caroline Simard announced that the Commission is organizing a Women in Production event this fall.
CRTC chair Ian Scott introduced Simard, saying: “The industry’s potential will only be fully realized when women – half the country’s population – are in key creative and decision-making positions. And yet, women continue to face systemic barriers to career advancement in this industry. The problem has been well defined by studies over the years but unfortunately, the metrics are not changing. It is long past…
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OTTAWA – Seeking to address a “noticeable gap” in affordable, occasional-use pay-as-you-go wireless plans, the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) and National Pensioners Federation (NPF) have asked the CRTC to order the national wireless carriers to offer them.
In an application filed Friday, PIAC-NPF asked the Commission to apply a condition of service directing Rogers, Bell and Telus to make occasional-use retail wireless plans broadly available to consumers in the same manner as the Commission proposed to do with lower-cost data-only plans in its ‘skinny wireless’ decision last month. The application also asks to combine the two proceedings “to…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC said Friday that the current competitor quality of service (Q of S) regime must be updated to keep pace with Canadians’ increasing reliance on broadband and mobile wireless services.
In TRP CRTC 2018-123, the Commission determined that additional regulatory oversight is necessary for all providers of both aggregated and disaggregated wholesale high-speed access (HSA) services, and that these services should be included in a competitor Q of S regime. It added that the large incumbent local exchange carriers’ (ILECs) wholesale services and processes that are subject to the current competitor Q of S regime should no longer be included…
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MANY YEARS AGO, AFTER a particularly chaotic day in a newsroom, a couple of colleagues and I shared a deep breath, a relieved laugh and shook our heads in dismay.
“If only they knew,” one of us said of the readers we sought to serve, “… if only they knew.”
I decided then that If Only They Knew would be the title of my first book, a sort of Tales from the Crypt regarding the inner workings of those, at the time, large and chaotic newsrooms. The aim was not so much to debunk the romantic mythology of journalism as depicted…
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GEORGE SERENTSCHY WROTE an interesting piece in the Financial Post on Thursday, which I think is comprehensively mistaken. A former telecom regulator in Austria, Mr. Serentschy became dismayed with the state of investment in European mobile networks, and has been testifying effectively against the idea of MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) ever since.
I have had the pleasure of talking with Mr. Serentschy at breakfast in Ottawa last year, and his views are sincerely held and not without foundation. In his experience and opinion, European regulators set the price of interconnection too low, with the result…
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OTTAWA – The news that consumer complaints to the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) increased by 73% compared to the same period last year should be investigated and fixed by the CRTC, said the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC).
“Canadian consumers are sending a clear message they are being poorly treated by, and are suffering from misleading sales practices of, Internet, wireless, home phone and subscription TV services,” said John Lawford, PIAC executive director and general counsel in a press release.
PIAC also noted the CCTS report released Tuesday revealed that the leading complaint…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC has dismissed a complaint against OMNI Regional’s parent Rogers Media that alleged non-compliance with the service’s third-language news requirement.
The complaint, filed last October by Unifor on behalf of media workers at OMNI, claimed that Rogers’ decision to hire Fairchild TV to create its Cantonese and Mandarin newscasts rather than produce them in-house violated its condition of licence. The Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic and the Urban Alliance on Race Relations (CSALC/UARR) filed a similar application.
The applicants also raised concerns about the loss of editorial diversity and local news coverage for Chinese-speaking Canadians due to…
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