OTTAWA – Canada’s wireless carriers are being asked to turn over their Apple iPhone sales records as the Competition Bureau deepens its probe into alleged anti-competitive clauses in Apple Canada sales contracts.
According to a Toronto Star report on Tuesday, the Bureau filed applications with the Federal Court on Monday calling for data from carriers including Rogers, Bell and Telus.
As Cartt.ca reported, the Bureau filed a court application last December requiring Apple Canada Inc. to provide records and written returns of information relevant to the investigation. The Star report quoted an unnamed source that said the Bureau is dissatisfied with the…
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TORONTO – The emergence of a fourth national wireless player would cause a ripple within the wireless sector in Canada, but the risk to the country’s three incumbents may be overblown, says Canaccord Genuity.
In a report on Monday, research analyst Aravinda Galappatthige proposed and evaluated a potential facilities-based wireless new entrant model based on the combination of Wind Mobile Canada, Mobilicity and Videotron’s spectrum holdings outside of its home province. Dubbed Newco, the fictional wireless provider was assumed to cover British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario, a model which combines Wind and Mobilicity’s existing 3G operations with Videotron’s AWS-1, AWS-3,…
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TORONTO – Telus is pulling the plug on its Black’s photography chain citing “technological innovations” that have changed the way that Canadians take and share photos.
According to a Toronto Star report on Tuesday, the closures will take effect August 8 and affect about 485 employees. The company said that it will try to find positions for them within Telus and Koodo.
Company spokeswoman Luiza Staniec said that Canadians are sharing their pictures on social media sites like Instagram and choosing cloud storage solutions instead of printing out pictures, a primary business at Black’s.
There were 113 Black’s locations in Canada when…
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VANCOUVER – Seeking to keep up with its rival Shaw, Telus is making free public Wi-Fi available at more than 8,000 hotspots across B.C. and Alberta.
Available to both Telus and non-Telus customers, the Wi-Fi network integrates with Telus' 4G wireless network, with Telus smartphones automatically establishing a secure connection to the #TELUSdirect network when they are in range. Non-Telus customers can connect to #TELUS through a splash page for the same service.
Telus said that it has been actively expanding its public Wi-Fi network since early 2014 to strategically select locations with high foot traffic and/or dwell times. Telus Wi-Fi is also…
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TORONTO – The industry must harden its wireless and broadband networks in Canada because good enough isn’t good enough anymore, a top Telus executive told Canadian Telecom Summit delegates this week.
“It was only 30 years ago that we deployed our first cellular networks in this country and about 25 years ago the internet, as we know it… were deployed,” said Telus chief technology officer Eros Spadotto. “At the time, these networks were the bleeding edge of technology, but perhaps ironically, they were deployed on a ‘best efforts basis.” That is, connectivity was not guaranteed.
Calls were (and still are) dropped…
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TORONTO – “Why can’t we be friends?” Wind Mobile CEO Alek Krstajic asked delegates to the Canadian Telecom Summit in a luncheon keynote on Tuesday.
The 1975 song by War actually played him off the stage at the end of his speech, but the theme hung in the air: Why can’t the industry accept what’s coming from Ottawa and just compete for the affections of Canadians on a level playing field that the Conservative government helped build?
Krstajic has been through the wars. Many of them, really. He spent years working for Rogers Cable before moving to Bell Canada and then…
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TORONTO — This year’s regulatory blockbuster panel at the Canadian Telecom Summit on Tuesday turned into a bit of a public hearing on wholesale telecom rates as the Big Three carriers’ pricing structures came under fire from TekSavvy and Wind Mobile.
Calling wholesale network access rates “crazy”, Bram Abramson, TekSavvy’s chief legal and regulatory officer, said wholesale prices can vary among telecom providers by as much as 700%. With the current pricing schemes of the large, vertically integrated incumbents, TekSavvy is unable to offer higher-speed services to its customers because it couldn’t be price competitive, Abramson said.
“TekSavvy is not the…
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TORONTO—Despite all the industry hype surrounding Big Data, service providers can easily fail with analytics initiatives if they focus too much on just the data itself.
That was one of a number of key takeaway points from data analytics experts at the Canadian Telecom Summit here Monday. Speaking on a packed morning panel, the six industry experts advised telecom and cable providers to put their business values and customer needs first, not the tracking, collection and analysis of all the data flowing through their networks. Otherwise, the experts warned, the data analytics projects will likely either fall short of expectations…
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OTTAWA and TIVERTON, ON – Ontario nuclear generating facility Bruce Power has asked the CRTC to order wireless service providers to carry and deliver emergency public alerts to all Canadians with mobile phones by September 30, 2015.
In a letter dated May 29 and addressed to CRTC secretary general John Traversy, Bruce Power noted that the Commission’s mandatory distribution of emergency alert messages in 2014 only applied to broadcasters, as it waits on the outcomes of voluntary activities like the CRTC Interconnection Steering Committee’s work on developing a Wireless Public Alerting System (WPAS) using cell broadcast technology on LTE networks.
“This work…
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VANCOUVER – More than 16,000 Telus employees, retirees and their friends and family are giving back with their hearts and hands and doing #actsofgood at more than 1,000 charitable and community activities during Telus Days of Giving from May 16 to June 14.
Most activities took place on Saturday, with volunteers coming together to serve breakfast to the homeless, build tactile books for blind children, and escort disabled adults to a community waterfront event. Social art rallies were held in Vancouver and Toronto.
"Coming together as an organization to create positive change in the communities where we live, work and raise…
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