TORONTO – Rogers received close to 175,000 requests for customer data from federal agencies in 2013, the company disclosed Thursday in its first ever Transparency Report.
As Cartt.ca reported, a coalition of Canadian academics and consumer groups asked the country’s biggest telecommunications service providers in January to reveal the extent to which they pass on their customers’ private information to government agencies when asked. Sixteen different telcos were asked to respond or commit to responding by March 3, 2014.
Rogers said in the report that it fully complies with Canadian privacy law and actively safeguards its customers’ information. At the…
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TORONTO – Given the pile of money Rogers Communications paid for the rights to the National Hockey League games for the next 12 years, look for the wholesale fees paid for sports by BDUs – and their customers – to shoot up.
A research report recently published by Scotia Capital analyst Jeff Fan says that if you think sports makes up a big portion of BDUs’ programming costs now, just wait. When the sports genre was deregulated by the CRTC back in 2010, CTV/Bell Media served notice that rates for TSN (which had been the same for more than a…
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EMERALD PARK, Sask. – It may have taken a little longer than expected for Ag-Com Productions to bring The Rural Channel (TRC) to life, but it recently celebrated its one year anniversary. On May 29, 2013 the rural lifestyle and agri-food business channel hit Canadian airwaves through an exclusive distribution arrangement with Shaw Direct.
Originally licensed in August 2008, TRC took five years to come to fruition. It had planned to go to air in 2011, but it had to wait on the launch of Shaw Direct’s new satellite. Even so, Bill Wilson (pictured), founder, president…
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ELLIOT LAKE, ON – The DiversityCanada Foundation wants the Governor in Council to quash a section of the Wireless Code of Conduct regarding prepaid wireless service cards, after the CRTC declined to do so.
The Foundation and the National Pensioners Federation submitted a joint petition Monday seeking to overturn a provision in the Code that they say “permits Bell, Rogers, Telus and other wireless providers to place expiry dates on cash held in the accounts of 3.7 million prepaid wireless consumers”.
The petition claims that the CRTC breached its duty of procedural fairness by ignoring evidence that prepaid wireless accounts hold…
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TORONTO – “It was not a take or leave it situation,” Ken Engelhart, senior VP of regulatory at Rogers Communications Inc., says of the roaming agreement the company signed with new entrant Wind Mobile.
In an interview with Cartt.ca Wednesday, he rebutted a number of the points that Simon Lockie, chief regulatory officer at Wind, made during an appearance before the Standing Senate Committee on Transportation and Communications on Tuesday. It’s simply not true that Wind had no choice but to accept the agreement it did, Engelhart says.
“I disagree very strongly with the notion that this…
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MONTREAL — Bell Canada has begun the rollout of its 700 MHz wireless services across the country and will announce “in the next month or so” the communities across Canada, representing 96 or 97% of the population that will be able to use it by the end of 2015, BCE president and CEO George Cope said Monday.
The network upgrade, which will make use of the $565 million worth of spectrum Bell bought in this year’s auction, is just one of many improvements to the company’s services that Cope spoke confidently about in a speech to the Canadian Club of…
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GATINEAU – New entrants and would-be wireless providers find themselves trying to again convince the federal telecom regulator that it needs to intervene in the wireless market. At the same time however, the incumbent operators tell the CRTC everything is working just fine as it is.
The comments come as the CRTC is studying the wholesale wireless services market with the goal of determining if the market is competitive enough or whether it needs to impose more regulations on roaming, tower and site sharing and others. All interventions can be found here. The public hearing is scheduled for September…
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OTTAWA-GATINEAU – Cable companies reported modest growth in revenues and subscribers in 2013, while satellite companies recorded a decline in both categories, according to the CRTC’s statistical and financial results for the industry released Thursday.
According to Broadcast Distribution 2009–2013: Cable, Multipoint Distribution Systems and Direct-to-Home, combined revenues for both cable and satellite companies increased by 4.8% from $14.1 billion in 2012 to $14.8 billion in 2013. The total number of subscribers, (which includes customers subscribed to IPTV services such as Bell’s Fibe TV or Telus’ Optik TV, but excludes independent cable companies with less than 2,000 subs and who…
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OTTAWA – The CRTC must address "the incentives" that Canada’s largest mobile wireless companies have to raise their competitors’ wholesale prices, and, offer new entrants help in gaining a foothold in the market.
That’s the gist of a submission made public Thursday by the Competition Bureau to the CRTC, in response to the Commission’s review of wholesale mobile wireless services.
Noting that mobile wireless companies, particularly new entrants, may need to enter into arrangements with the likes of Bell, Rogers and Telus to obtain certain wholesale mobile wireless services, the Bureau said that the retail market power that these large incumbents wield…
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MONTREAL – By fixating on promoting the emergence of a fourth wireless carrier in each of Canada's regional markets, the federal government has lost sight of the ultimate goal of promoting the development of a dynamic, efficient telecommunications industry, says a new research paper released Tuesday by the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI).
The paper, The State of Competition in Canada's Telecommunications Industry – 2014, says that the current government has committed itself to relying on market forces as much as possible to achieve its telecom policy objectives. But this orientation has been contradicted by set-asides, spectrum caps, mandatory network…
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