TORONTO — Apple today unveiled several new devices, including Apple Watch Series 6 and Apple Watch SE, as well as two new iPad models and a new way to subscribe to everything Apple. (Jeepers, that’s four mentions of the company in one sentence!)
The company also announced a new Family Setup feature in watchOS 7 which extends the watch experience to the entire family, as well as a Fitness+, the first fitness experience built for Apple Watch.
Starting with the new device announcements, Apple Watch Series 6 offers a new feature that measures the oxygen saturation of the user’s blood,…
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GATINEAU — The CRTC announced today it has agreed to a nine-month extension of the deadline for the implementation of the STIR/SHAKEN framework for authenticating caller ID information for IP-based voice calls. The implementation deadline is now June 30, 2021.
STIR/SHAKEN stands for Secure Telephony Identity Revisited/Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs. The framework provides a suite of protocols and procedures intended to combat fraudulent caller ID spoofing by authenticating and verifying the caller ID information. It’s something upon which the federal government is focused.
In December 2019, the Commission mandated Canadian telecommunications service providers (TSPs) implement the security…
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By Denis Carmel
MONTREAL – Since January 2019, Bell Media has been offering a “one-day subscription” to its TSN and RDS services on their website, allowing viewers to therefore bypass buying a Videotron cable package (even if they are already a Videotron internet subscriber) for a day, for $5, perhaps as a test drive, or to see one particular big game.
Videotron claimed in a court filing this is a breach of its contract with Bell and further claimed this type of offering could jeopardize the Canadian broadcasting system by content producers offering their services over-the-top.
In a decision last week, the…
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LANGLEY, B.C. — The government of British Columbia announced today a $2-million motion picture fund to help B.C. film and TV producers and creators to get projects off the ground as the industry restarts in the province.
“The past few months have shown us how quickly the motion picture industry can change,” said B.C. Premier John Horgan, in the government’s news release. “This new fund will help B.C.’s domestic film industry create new content so it can recover faster and get thousands of skilled workers involved in film and TV production back on set.”
Part of the province’s Covid-19 relief…
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By Denis Carmel
GATINEAU – Enough delay, say the independent ISPs.
TekSavvy, Distributel and the Competitive Network Operators of Canada on Friday filed applications with the CRTC demanding the incumbent telco and cable carriers file new tariffs as ordered by the Commission in its August 2019 decision setting new wholesale internet rates (CRTC 2019-288).
The decision gave the network owners until September 14, 2019 to do so, but only Telus filed. Later, SaskTel filed its tariff pages after a CRTC reminder. The other incumbents declined to do so, pending the three appeals of the decision filed shortly after the August 2019 rates…
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CHATHAM, Ont – TekSavvy Solutions, Canada’s largest third party internet access provider, said today that unless and until the network owners it uses starts paying the retroactive costs owed to it which was demanded by the CRTC, the company will stop paying its monthly wholesale fee payments to Bell and Rogers.
While praising yesterday’s decision from the Federal Court of Appeal, which upheld the wholesale rates set in August 2019 by the CRTC with a decision that also called for retroactive repayments of the difference between the interim rates and the new rates, dating back to 2016, TekSavvy drew…
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Incumbents have already asked the CRTC for a stay of the rates
By Denis Carmel
OTTAWA – In a lengthy, thorough decision, the Federal Court of Appeal on Thursday said the CRTC’s August 2019 decision setting final wholesale rates for aggregated wholesale high-speed access services, and hundreds of millions in retroactive payments, was just fine.
The decision goes through the history of wholesale rate setting, which actually dates back to 1979. The Court outlines the details of decision CRTC 2019-288 referencing productivity factors, upstream traffic growth rates, attribution of segmentation costs, speed-banding, unrecovered costs, working fill factors (WFF), coaxial cable…
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Adds there will be further pursuit of Cogeco
By Ken Kelley
NEW YORK – Following last week’s big news which saw Altice USA and Rogers team up to try and buy Cogeco (a deal which was utterly and repeatedly rejected by Louis Audet, its controlling shareholder), it was little surprise the topic was first on the agenda when Rogers executives Joe Natale and Tony Staffieri spoke Wednesday at Bank of America Securities’ virtual 2020 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference.
“We have immense respect for Mr. Audet and his family, and for the legacy of the company,” said Rogers CEO Natale. “At…
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OTTAWA – The Federal Court of Appeal has sided with the third party internet service providers in their defence of the August 2019 CRTC decision which lowered wholesale rates they pay to the incumbent telcos and cablecos – and established retroactive payments dating back several years.
It was a unanimous 3-0 decision and grants the respondents (the independents) their legal costs, too.
Companies like TekSavvy and Distributel and Start.ca serve tens of thousands of Canadians by leasing space on the networks of Bell, Rogers, Telus, Cogeco and the like and when the CRTC set the new rates with that decision,…
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HAMILTON – When the Covid-19 pandemic hit and local music venues closed, musicians and artists were left without stages to perform on because no crowds were allowed to gather.
The Westdale Theatre has partnered with Cable 14 (connected online thanks to Clearcable) to present Live From The Westdale to give artists a platform.
The community channel co-owned by local cable companies Cogeco and Rogers, Cable 14 has been showcasing the talent of Hamilton for 50 years, bringing the voices of countless musicians and artists from the region to the airwaves.
Live From The Westdale is a series of television specials recorded…
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