By Christopher Guly
OTTAWA – In Toronto on Thursday, Innovation, Science and Industry Navdeep Bains gave Canada’s Big Three wireless carriers an ultimatum to lower their prices within two years while increasing competition by giving smaller and regional telecom companies a chance to bid on 50MHz of a 3500 MHz spectrum auction to be held later this year.
Bains spoke to Parliament Hill correspondent Christopher Guly prior to making his major announcement.
Christopher Guly: So you’re forcing the big guys to lower their prices and giving smaller, regional guys a break to help do that.
Navdeep Bains: You’re right. The spectrum set-aside is…
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OTTAWA — On Tuesday, the same day it denied an application by the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) and the National Pensioners Federation (NPF) to require Koodo Mobile and other wireless service providers to provide paper bills upon request, the CRTC announced a new proceeding looking into the issue of paper billing.
In its decision against PIAC and NPF, the Commission says it found “there was no existing legislature or regulatory obligation that mandated the provision of paper bills and, since the rationale and evidence on the record of this proceeding related largely to Koodo alone, it would not…
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TORONTO — As the world’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes prepare to compete this summer, Accessible Media Inc. (AMI) announced Tuesday that season three of Mind Set Go returns to AMI-tv on Wednesday, April 1 at 8 p.m. The series is co-produced by AMI and Anaïd Productions in partnership with the Canadian Paralympic Committee.
The third season (8×60) follows eight Canadians living with a disability, debilitating injury or chronic pain as they transform their physical, mental and emotional health over a 90-day journey of body, mind and soul, says the news release. Lead expert Stephanie Dixon, a 19-time Paralympic medallist,…
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CALGARY — Ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8, Global Calgary announced Tuesday Cami Kepke (pictured left) is the network’s new weekend sports anchor. Effective immediately, Kepke is joining the Global News Hour at 6 Weekend and Global News at 11 Weekend anchor teams of Jayme Doll and Jodi Hughes.
Kepke has been a journalist with Global Calgary since April 2019. She previously worked as a digital broadcast journalist/anchor with the Global Regina team. With a passion for telling unique news and sports stories, she won an RTDNA for Sports Feature Reporting in 2017.
Kepke’s career began in Northern B.C. as…
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Far north provider sees good traction
By Ahmad Hathout
GATINEAU – Executives at Canadian wired and wireless service provider SSi Micro said Friday the Yellowknife-based company has seen “high” consumption of its lower-cost wireless plans and that those packages are a necessary component of the market.
“If you look at the disposition of users amongst all of our plans, you would find that a very large number of them are on a lower-end plan but you would also find that our consumers switch plans very easily,” SSi Micro’s founder and CEO Jeff Philipp (pictured in a cpac.ca screen cap) told CRTC commissioners…
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TORONTO — Independent Internet and TV service provider VMedia Inc. has submitted an objection to cabinet (officially the Governor-in-Council) in response to Bell Canada’s and the major incumbent cablecos’ petitions in November, in which they asked cabinet to overturn the CRTC’s August decision concerning final rates for aggregated wholesale high-speed access (HSA) services.
VMedia filed its submission on February 14, the last day to do so, and has posted a copy on its website. On Thursday, the independent ISP issued a news release to publicize its submission to cabinet and to explain its arguments for why the Commission’s decision…
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TORONTO — After premiering last weekend on Netflix, the four-hour docuseries Unabomber: In His Own Words will air in its entirety on Discovery Channel tonight at 8 p.m. ET and 5 p.m. PT.
Starting March 4, the series (4×60) will then re-air one episode at a time Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET on Investigation Discovery, and will begin streaming on Crave on April 3, the 25th anniversary of the Unabomber’s capture.
Domestic terrorist Ted J. Kaczynski is a Harvard-educated math prodigy and University of California-Berkeley professor who infamously led the FBI on a $50-million, 17-year-long manhunt and inspired a new generation…
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By Denis Carmel
GATINEAU – Until now the CRTC regime in place to compensate owners of conventional TV signals distributed by cable companies outside of their markets seem to work fairly well.
Terrestrial BDUs offer distant signals for ‘time shifting’ purposes. It allows subscribers to watch popular shows at a different time by watching a station in a different time zone. Since local stations are losing advertising money (advertisers only pay for local viewership) a compensation regime was put in place.
To distribute such signal, the cable company needs consent from and provide compensation to the owners of conventional television stations. Before…
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By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – Lawmakers envisaged the Broadcasting Act giving the CRTC broad powers to temporarily regulate disputes between broadcasters and program providers in the public interest, including when they involve economic relationships, the federal government is arguing in court documents.
The argument hits at the heart of an appeal by Quebecor which last April pulled its TVA Sports signal from Bell TV subscribers because the company believed its channel was undervalued compared to the Bell Media’s RDS channel. The move caused the CRTC to convene an emergency hearing and forced Quebecor to redistribute the signal based on the…
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And beware of 5G hype, says dotmobile
By Ahmad Hathout
GATINEAU – Despite holding the largest wireless market share in Saskatchewan, crown corporation SaskTel said it doesn’t have the ability to lead on wireless prices in the province, cautioning against calls for it to be required to lease its network to mobile virtual network operators.
The comment came Thursday on the second last day of the CRTC’s wireless policy review hearing in response to a question about whether SaskTel has market power as a result of the western province being the only one in the country that isn’t majority-served by the big…
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