By Ahmad Hathout
The city of Ottawa is arguing before the CRTC that Videotron is relying on the wrong agreement in its request for the regulator to force the city to reimburse the carrier for having to move its transmission lines for the construction of city projects.
Videotron filed a Part 1 application last month alleging the city has refused to compensate it $300,000 for the move to make way for projects at Montreal Road and Woodroffe Avenue because it was made at the request of its subsidiary Hydro Ottawa, which the telecom argued doesn’t make sense because…
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By Ahmad Hathout
TVA Group will be able to broadcast fewer newscasts and hours of local programming to allow it to be nimbler in a rough financial environment, the CRTC ruled Monday.
TVA parent company Quebecor a year ago filed to the CRTC the request to ease the regulatory obligations on CFCM-DT in Quebec City, saying it would need some relief from the need to broadcast two newscasts every weekend and reduce by two hours the requirement to maintain 18 hours of local programming per week. The alternative to that, it warned, is that it would have to make “difficult…
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By Ahmad Hathout
As the three largest carriers saw higher wireless customer turnover in the first quarter, the presumptive fourth carrier is doing a victory lap over what it said is its relatively stable churn.
“Our churn is stable, whereas our competition is increasing,” said Hugues Simard, Quebecor’s Chief Financial Officer on a quarterly conference call Thursday. “I think that continues to be a very encouraging .”
Rogers, Bell, and Telus all reported higher churn in the first quarter this year compared to the same period last year. The higher figure was met with concern, but one for which they…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Telus is the last of the three largest telecoms to report Thursday a higher rate of customer turnover in its mobile wireless business.
The Vancouver-based telecom pointed to aggressive retail pricing in the second half of 2023 that seeped into the first quarter as having an outsized impact on the defection rate this quarter, which was up to 1.13 per cent compared to the 0.9 per cent it held in the same period last year.
Telus prides itself on its low churn, as for years it held the distinction of being able to tout a sub-1 per cent rate…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Bell CEO Mirko Bibic said Thursday that the higher rate of customers switching to other carriers is “concerning,” but that the telco is mitigating that with bundled offers.
Last week, Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri blamed competition from aggressively priced mobile wireless offers in the market and ease of switching for its postpaid churn rate rising to 1.1 per cent in the quarter compared to the same period last year. While Staffieri said he expects the trend to continue, he added the company isn’t worried about it.
Bell’s postpaid churn rate for the first quarter that ended…
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Wireless prices in Canada decreased an average of 18.2 per cent for data plans in 2023 when compared to 2022 prices, according to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada’s 2023 Price Comparison Study of Telecom Services, published Tuesday.
The annual report — which provides a comparative price analysis of wireless and home internet services in Canada, both regionally and relative to G7 peer countries and Australia — also found home internet prices in Canada declined across all service plans in 2023. There were significant decreases on plans up to 100 Mbps, including decreases…
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The Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) released Thursday its 2024 mid-year report, which shows a 43 per cent increase in the number of complaints from telecom and TV customers in Canada between Aug. 1, 2023 and Jan. 31, 2024, compared to figures in the CCTS’s mid-year report a year ago.
For the six-month period, the CCTS accepted 10,663 customer complaints, compared to 7,451 complaints at last year’s midpoint, the new report says. Of the complaints received during the report’s timeframe, 9,272 were concluded, having raised 19,879 issues.
Wireless service issues remain the leading…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri said Wednesday that the company expects to see increased wireless subscriber movement between carriers throughout the year in part due to heightened competition and ease of switching.
The cable giant saw its rate of postpaid customer defections for the first quarter of the year increase to 1.1 per cent compared to the 0.79 per cent it logged in the same quarter last year.
Staffieri said part of this came from the competitive offers from other carriers that seeped from the holiday season into the new year. Quebecor’s Freedom, for example, has been pushing and holding…
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Quebecor said it will rethink pricing strategy as a result
By Ahmad Hathout
Quebecor will need to accept Telus’s rate to connect to its wireless network, the CRTC ruled Monday, eliciting a scathing response from the Montreal company that included a promise to reconsider its low-cost pricing and suspend the launch of certain plans in Manitoba.
Telus and Quebecor could not come to an agreement on the price-per-gigabyte component of that access, so they each presented their respective prices and asked the CRTC to make that determination via final offer arbitration.
While it said both offers would allow Quebecor’s mobile virtual network…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Cogeco is still working toward securing a deal with the national carriers to launch its mobile virtual network operator business on their networks, the telecom’s senior vice president and chief financial officer said Friday.
“Where we are right now is we’re still in negotiations…at the same time building what is required to launch as well,” Patrice Ouimet said during the company’s fiscal second-quarter conference call with analysts. “I would say the situation is not that different from what I said last quarter. That being said, we are making progress.”
Ouimet said he couldn’t go any deeper because these are…
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