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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STOCKHOLM — Ericsson announced Thursday its dynamic spectrum sharing solution, allowing for both 4G and 5G to be deployed in the same band and on the same radio through a software upgrade, is now commercially available.
Ericsson Spectrum Sharing (ESS) dynamically allocates spectrum based on user demand on a 1 millisecond basis, the news release says. ESS makes more efficient use of spectrum, allowing communications service providers to quickly and cost-effectively launch 5G on existing bands on a nationwide scale, Ericsson says.
According to Ericsson’s news release, more than 80% of service providers currently testing ESS plan to deploy it…
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And, MVNOs won’t help
By Ahmad Hathout
GATINEAU – The CRTC’s last mandate for the wireless industry – low-cost data-only plans which originally stood in lieu of a regulatory regime for mobile virtual network operators – have not been popular with customers, Rogers executives told the CRTC today.
“A substantially bigger package of data without voice and text is not as appealing” as less data with talk and text, David Watt, Rogers’ senior vice-president of regulatory affairs, said Wednesday in front of CRTC commissioners reviewing the wireless industry.
“I think we had thought low-cost data-only appeal to people who use a fair…
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MONTREAL — Canadian cloud and data centre services provider eStruxture has partnered with China Mobile International (CMI) to provide the Hong Kong-based company with its first data centre presence in Montreal, the companies announced Wednesday.
A wholly owned subsidiary of China Mobile, CMI offers international telecom services and solutions to enterprises, carriers and mobile users. CMI has a Canadian office in Markham, Ont.
Through the partnership, CMI will offer network access at eStruxture’s MTL-1 facility in Montreal. eStruxture customers can now enjoy high-speed connectivity to CMI’s extensive global infrastructure for mobile communications and cloud services, says the news release. CMI…
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