By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – The CRTC has put out a contract notice Thursday for a consultancy firm that will assist in analyzing the network outage at Rogers last summer and improvements the company has committed to going forward.
The July 8 network blackout brought down critical services for millions of Canadians, including government, banking and emergency services in some cases.
This week, the regulator announced the launch of the first of a number of proceedings on telecom network resiliency, the first of which will include mandatory notification requirements on all service providers when outages like these happen. As…
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By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – The CRTC is asking Rogers if it would like to withdraw or amend an application related to a years-long dispute involving its access to New Brunswick poles, following the commission’s decision establishing concrete timelines for access to those support structures.
In the summer of 2020, the cable company filed a Part 1 application asking the CRTC to intervene in a dispute in which it alleged that Bell was delaying providing access to parts of the pole it co-owns with the utility, NB Power. Rogers alleged Bell was playing a “gatekeeper role” over access, which it…
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TORONTO – Rogers, Shaw and Quebecor have once again agreed Friday to delay the date of their respective transactions, as the previous deadline has come and after the innovation minister said this week he isn’t close to making a decision on the transfers.
The outside closing date has been pushed back several times for the deals involving the transfer of Freedom to Videotron and then Shaw to Rogers. It was previously January 31, then it was pushed to February 17, and now the parties are hoping that the minister makes a decision by March 31, which is the date…
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Company also said it is confident it will compete against fourth player in Videotron
By Ahmad Hathout
TORONTO – Rogers executives said the company expects network resiliency to be a more important factor than price in driving up new subscribers going forward.
The company is coming off a network outage last summer that paralyzed the country, impacting critical institutions like government and banking. The fallout of the outage put a spotlight on the importance of network resiliency and redundance and spawned a commitment from the large carrier to physically separate its mobile and wireline networks and invest $20 billion…
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Rogers, Shaw, and Quebecor’s Videotron announced today that they have agreed to extend the closing date of their transactions to February 17.
The expected closing date of Rogers acquiring Shaw and Videotron acquiring Shaw’s Freedom Mobile assets was January 31, which was set before the Competition Bureau appealed a decision of the Competition Tribunal that denied its petition to block the deal. The Federal Court of Appeal upheld the tribunal’s decision last week, and the bureau said it will not appeal to the Supreme Court.
The transfer of Freedom’s assets to Videotron must now be approved by Innovation…
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MPs will discuss the deal on Monday, letter says
By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA — Five members of Parliament sent a letter dated today to Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne urging him not to approve the transfer of Freedom’s spectrum assets to Videotron until a “free and open” process, approved by the Competition Bureau, is held to determine the suitor of the assets.
During a House industry committee hearing Wednesday, some MPs were concerned as to how Rogers ended up getting to pick Videotron as the buyer of Freedom to complete its acquisition of Shaw (the bureau has remained steadfast in…
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By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – Members of the House industry committee took issue today with Rogers being allowed to choose Videotron as its competitor to complete its acquisition of Shaw, with one member of Parliament saying it “boggles the mind” to think Rogers would sell Freedom for less if it meant more competition.
Today’s hearing was the committee’s second round at the Rogers-Shaw merger, this time with the new development that Videotron agreed to purchase Freedom from Shaw for nearly $3 billion. It also comes a day after the Federal Court of Appeal upheld a…
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OTTAWA – Rogers’s proposed purchase of Shaw faces just one more hurdle: the innovation minister’s approval of the transfer of Freedom spectrum assets to Videotron, which agreed to purchase the company for nearly $3 billion.
The deal’s prospects improved dramatically when it survived a Competition Bureau challenge at the Federal Court of Appeal, which denied yesterday a request to find in error the Competition Tribunal’s approval of the deal. Even more so when the bureau announced late last evening that it will not appeal the court’s decision.
But now scrutiny will be leveled against it…
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By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA — The Competition Bureau will not challenge a decision by the Federal Court of Appeal today that summarily rejected its arguments against a Rogers acquisition of Shaw, thereby leaving only the minister of innovation to approve or deny the deal.
“We are truly disappointed that the Federal Court of Appeal has dismissed our appeal of the Competition Tribunal’s decision in Rogers-Shaw,” Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell said in a press release this evening, adding the bureau stands by the findings of its investigation and the decision to challenge the merger.
“We continue to disagree with the…
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The court did not need to hear from merging parties
By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – The three-justice panel of the Federal Court of Appeal that initially went for a two-hour lunch during today’s hearing came back 45 minutes later than expected and delivered a verdict from the bench to reject the Competition Bureau’s challenge to a decision by the Competition Tribunal last month that allowed the Rogers purchase of Shaw to move forward.
The decision came after about two-and-a-half hours of arguments from the bureau, which failed to convince the court that the tribunal made errors sufficient enough to require it to…
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