OTTAWA – The CRTC has been asked to step in to help resolve a standoff between Bell Canada and the City of Hamilton over a new municipal access agreement (MAA).
In an application to the Commission dated August 22, 2014 but made public recently, the Ontario city said that its previous MAA expired in 2012, and that it notified Bell a year prior to say that it would not renew that agreement as it “provides no mechanism or means of holding Bell to account for its failures to either perform at an acceptable level or comply with the City’s basic…
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OTTAWA – Area code 548 will be rolled out in in the region currently served by area codes 226 and 519 in southwestern Ontario starting June 4, 2016, the Telecommunications Alliance confirmed Tuesday.
After this date, residents and businesses requesting a new phone number may get a number with the 548 area code. Numbers with the new area code will only be assigned to customers when the existing supply of 226 and 519 numbers is depleted.
Currently, the 226 and 519 area codes cover most of southwestern Ontario, which includes the communities of London, Windsor, Kitchener-Waterloo, Guelph, Brantford, Sarnia, Woodstock, Stratford…
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OTTAWA – Burlington, ON could soon have a new radio station after the CRTC issued a call for comments on market capacity and on the appropriateness of issuing a call for radio applications to serve that area.
The Commission said Friday that it issued the call after receiving an application from Byrnes Communications Inc. for a new commercial mainstream music station in that market. The private broadcaster, based in Woodstock, ON, operates the adult contemporary station 104.7 Heart FM serving the London-Woodstock-Tillsonburg areas.
The city of Burlington is included within both the Hamilton Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) and the Hamilton Central…
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OTTAWA and GATINEAU – Businesses installing software or computer programs on another person’s computer must now have their consent, the CRTC announced Thursday.
Under the new requirements, for example, it is now illegal for a website to automatically install software on a visitor's computer or for an app on a mobile device to be updated without first obtaining consent. The CRTC has the primary enforcement responsibility and is able to investigate, take action against and set administrative monetary penalties against those who are not in compliance.
These new requirements, which are effective immediately, are part of Canada's anti-spam legislation adopted by…
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WINNIPEG – Louis Ralph (Bud) Sherman will be remembered Thursday at a memorial service in Winnipeg after his passing on January 9, 2015 at the age of 88 after a short illness.
Sherman was appointed as a CRTC commissioner in 1985 and worked for the Commission for more than 10 years during which time he became vice-chairman of telecommunications in 1987 until his retirement in 1995. According to an obituary in the Winnipeg Free Press, his proudest accomplishment during his time with the CRTC was “the central role he played in work relating to long distance competition in the…
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OTTAWA – The Community Radio Fund of Canada (CRFC) said that radio stations may now apply to receive even more money for their local programming thanks to revisions to the latest round of its Radiometres funding program.
Applicants to the fifth round of CRFC’s Radiometres program will be able to ask for an amount up to $50,000 per individual application or between $110,000 and $250,000 for collaborative applications, the organization announced Monday. Stations have until February 27, 2015 to submit their application, and all Canadian campus and community stations are eligible for this round. The revised guidelines and new application…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC received only 42 consumer complaints regarding bandwidth throttling by their Internet service providers (ISPs) in 2014, with most of those coming in the fourth quarter.
In its latest status report released Wednesday, the Commission said that it received 16 complaints regarding Internet Traffic Management Practices (ITMPs) from October 1 through December 31, 2014. Eleven complaints were received in the first quarter of the year, 10 in the second quarter and six in the third quarter.
There are nine active complaints as of December 31st, and 11 complaints were closed in the fourth quarter. Closed complaints include those where CRTC…
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OTTAWA–GATINEAU – The CRTC has approved the structure and mandate of the Canadian administrator of the country’s new video relay service, which could be could up and running by late 2015.
The service, green-lit by the Commission in April, will enable Canadians to place phone calls and communicate using American Sign Language (ASL) or Quebec Sign Language (QSL) where the technology is available. Designed for people who are deaf, hard of hearing and speech impaired and other Canadians, and vice versa, an operator facilitates the conversation between the two parties by relaying the conversation between sign language and spoken language.
The…
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“I BEGAN MY CAREER AT ROGERS 45 years ago, just after the 1968 Broadcasting Act was enacted and this Commission was created,” Phil Lind told CRTC chair Jean-Pierre Blais during the company’s appearance at September’s TV Policy Review hearing.
“Since that time, Mr. Chairman, I have had the pleasure of appearing before you and all your predecessors. I reckon I have represented Rogers at more than 100 broadcasting hearings over the past four-and-a-half decades.” That’s right, Lind has appeared before every single CRTC chairman there has ever been. His fingerprints are all over broadcasting policy in Canada.
There are very few…
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THE CHANGES WHICH have happened in wireless market over the last five years have been stunning in their breadth, depth and speed. The explosion in popularity of the Android platform and the Apple iPhone and the implosion of BlackBerry often gobble up all the headlines, but riding those waves for half a decade now in Canada has been Wind Mobile.
The company celebrated its birthday Tuesday by using Twitter to give away 50 new Nexus phones – and by making its new CEO, Pietro Cordova (right), available to the media. He’s no Canadian neophyte, having worked here in the 1990s,…
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