TORONTO – Any time members of the Canadian telecom industry gather together for a conference, the age-old debate about just how competitive the market actually is here inevitably emerges. The Canadian ISP Summit held this week in Toronto was no exception.
And in fact, opposing views on the subject, firmly expressed, provided most of the sparks during the conference’s final session on Wednesday, a panel discussion that tackled many of the regulatory issues currently faced by the telecom industry.
Moderated by telecom industry consultant Mark Goldberg (co-founder and organizer of the annual Canadian Telecom Summit), the regulatory panel featured: Dr. Michael…
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OTTAWA – Canadians’ complaints over their telecom and Internet services fell for the first time in the seven year history of the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS), but Commissioner Howard Maker stopped short of calling it a trend.
“From our examination of other statistics… we are cautiously optimistic that the industry as a whole is becoming more focused on customer issues and on how it addresses customer problems”, Maker wrote in the 2013-2014 annual report, called ‘Driving Positive Change’, released Tuesday.
The CCTS received 11,340 customer complaints in 2013-14, down 17% from 13,692 in 2012-13, and successfully resolved…
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I FINALLY HAVE A RESPONSE to something CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais asked we reporters – in absentia, mind you – during day eight of September’s Talk TV hearing, the day set aside for accessibility issues.
“I asked others beforehand – now they may be listening elsewhere – but the media table, which was chock-a-block last week, seems to be completely empty now,” chairman Blais said on September 17th. “And I'm struck, because members of the community you serve presumably buy goods and services – goods and services that are made by people that advertise in newspapers and other electronic media.
“Why…
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TORONTO – The radio industry, electronic media’s elder statesman, is not in trouble and the sky is not falling, but radio broadcasters need to do a better job at promoting their advertising success stories to keep marketers from becoming too distracted by the “shiny, new toy” (a.k.a. digital audio streaming services).
That was the rallying call delivered by Erica Farber, president and CEO of the U.S.-based Radio Advertising Bureau, during an industry executive town hall session at the Ontario Association of Broadcasters’ Connection 2014 conference, held Thursday in Toronto. “Success stories work,” she said. “We do not do a good…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC’s National Do Not Call List levied $3,050,595 in fees in the 2013-14 fiscal year, according to its annual report released Thursday.
During the 2013-2014 reporting period, from April 1, 2013 to March 31, 2014, Canadians registered 750,521 numbers, bringing the list’s total to 12,239,563 numbers, or about 29% of Canadian households.
There were 666 telemarketer registrations, bringing the total to 10,877. Telemarketer registrations to the National DNCL have increased by 14.5% since 2011-12, and by 23.2% since 2010-11. Telemarketers also bought 2,090 subscriptions to the List, ranging from one area code for one month to…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC has updated a number of aspects of its commercial radio policy in an effort to ensure that its approach is simple, effective and measurable.
The Commission said Tuesday that these radio policy updates will allow commercial radio to achieve the objectives of the Broadcasting Act and, ultimately, to better serve Canadians. In spite of relative stability, both financially and in terms of tuning, since the last policy review in 2006, the CRTC said that the commercial radio sector would nevertheless benefit from an update of certain regulatory and policy elements.
The changes include:
– A revised approach to…
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TORONTO – The Rogers sports department sure has been keeping its wireless division hopping with all this new hockey business.
Rogers Communications CEO Guy Laurence said yesterday that in just the first two weeks of the hockey season, there have been one million downloads of its new NHL GameCentre app and that 650 Terabytes of data have flowed through the app with an average of 80,000 fans streaming live games and on-demand video content through the application. Big numbers. A good start.
While many are doing this on Wi-Fi to save their data plan, there has been undeniable stress on the…
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GATINEAU – The NHL season was barely under way when Bell Canada filed a complaint with the CRTC over how Rogers is keeping an exclusive lid on some of the content for which it paid $5.2 billion.
In an application filed October 10th and just made public Tuesday on the CRTC web site, Bell says Rogers’ new digital services which extend the NHL experience online and on mobile, GameCentre and GamePlus, violate sections 3 and 5 of the Exemption Order for Digital Media Broadcasting Undertakings by giving the company an “anticompetitive advantage.” Rogers bought the NHL rights for 12 years from…
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TORONTO – Four traditional Canadian telcos which not that long ago had no TV subscribers now represent about 1.3 million Canadian subscription television customers.
A key reason behind that growth has been the offer of much more flexible packaging than what had been available from their cable and satellite competitors. While the telco TV companies’ cable competitors have made strides in that direction of late, it was the availability of smaller theme packs of specialty channels and some a-la-carte offerings that set the IPTV carriers apart from their more mature competition – who stuck with larger tiers for a long…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Canadian families spent over $190 each month last year on their communications services as the costs for wireless, TV and Internet services all grew at a rate higher than inflation, according to the 2014 edition of the CRTC’s Communications Monitoring Report.
The report, released Thursday, provides an overview of the Canadian communication industry for the year ended August 31, 2013. This year, the CRTC released the report in three parts. The first focused on the country’s broadcasting sector, and the second provided data on the telecommunications sector. With the publication of the third and final part,…
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