OTTAWA – The biggest challenge the Canadian broadcasting industry is facing is a subset of distributors who are seeking lower rates for specialty services, Kevin Crull, president of Bell Media, told the Canadian Media Production Association’s annual Prime Time 2012 conference in Ottawa on Friday morning.
Crull spoke about this issue and other challenges Bell Media is facing in a interview style session with former CTV president, former head of CBC News and current professor, MBA program in arts and media administration, Schulich School of Business, Trina McQueen. Crull said this issue is more important than the group licensing regime…
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TORONTO – John Maduri finds the claims being made by Canada’s wireless companies that they need access to 700 MHz wireless spectrum in order to deliver wireless broadband to rural Canadians to be nothing short of a “myth.”
Maduri runs a company, Xplornet, which has long made its living serving many thousands of customers who live and work nowhere near a high-rise. With a combination of fixed wireless and satellite service – and hundreds of millions of dollars invested – Xplornet is serving rural folks just fine, thanks, Maduri said in an interview with Cartt.ca. It’s…
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OTTAWA – Its game over for Telus’ complaints against Bell over exclusive mobile rights agreements to select National Hockey League (NHL) and National Football League (NFL) content, the CRTC said Thursday.
In a letter addressed to Mirko Bibic, Bell’s SVP of regulatory and government affairs, the Commission said that it accepts Bell’s report that the two agreements in question were entered into prior to the issuance of a temporary moratorium against certain new exclusive programming agreements, and before the vertical integration framework prohibition against carriage exclusives on new media platforms.
The Commission also acknowledged that Bell has since reached…
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TORONTO – Mobilicity went to the drawing board to illustrate its opinion on spectrum set-asides in the pending 700 MHz spectrum auction.
Inspired by Charles Dickens' classic novel Oliver Twist, the company issued a political cartoon (see below) satirizing Canada's incumbent carriers' “hoarding of spectrum" and efforts seeking to prevent new entrants' growth.
"For Mobilicity, acquiring more spectrum in the upcoming Federal Government auction is a must-have – not a nice-to-have," said president and COO Stewart Lyons, in Wednesday’s statement. "Our current 3G technology uses our entire 10MHz of spectrum and we need more to expand and introduce new technologies, such as LTE."
Lyons also claimed that…
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TORONTO – Wind Mobile made a final appeal to Industry Canada and the federal government to set aside a portion of the 700 MHz spectrum for exclusive bidding by new wireless entrants. The rules for the pending auction are expected to be announced shortly.
In a statement on Friday, CEO Anthony Lacavera said that the idea of spectrum caps, which was proposed by Telus, will not only shut investors out of the pending spectrum auction, buts it puts the ‘Big Three’ incumbents interests ahead of consumer interests.
“If Minister Paradis makes a decision to announce ‘caps’ over ‘set aside’…
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GATINEAU – Independent distributors Cogeco Cable, Telus, EastLink, MTS and the Canadian Cable Systems Alliance still hate the terms of carriage offered to them by Bell Media for its specialty channels and so the parties will soon face mandatory mediation in front of a CRTC commissioner as the carriers continue to allege undue preference against Bell.
The carriers, together they are calling themselves the Canadian Independent Distributors Group (CIDG), all object to the carriage agreement put before them by Bell Media for all of the company’s specialty channels, as we have previously reported. Bell Media insists…
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OTTAWA– The winning schools from across Canada who competed in a national recycling challenge for mobile phones and accessories where announced today. The 2011 Recycle My Cell Student Challenge, held in partnership with Waste Reduction Week in Canada, saw Canadian students from kindergarten to post-secondary collecting as many old wireless devices as possible, including cell phones, smartphones, wireless PDAs, pagers, accessories and cell phone batteries.
For 30 days beginning October 17, students from 134 schools across Canada participated in the second annual challenge and collected more than 6,000 wireless devices and close to 600 kilograms of wireless accessories and batteries….
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OTTAWA – The CRTC said today that it will continue to license satellite relay distribution undertakings (SRDUs) because of a lack of competition in that market, but will not incorporate the transport of pay and specialty services into SRDU licensing.
In its decision the Commission maintained that its dispute resolution process “remains the best way to address concerns regarding uplink fees that the Bell direct-to-home undertaking charges Canadian pay and specialty services for the transport of their signals to cable headends in cases where they do not need to use Bell’s SRDU facilities.” Canada’s only two SRDU operators, Shaw Satellite…
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GATINEAU – Shaw Communications filed an appeal to the CRTC on Friday regarding last October’s policy decision to quash usage-based billing in favour of incumbents charging independent internet service providers either a flat rate, or a rate based on capacity and the number of users.
Under the new regulatory regime, ISPs can now sell smaller providers a set capacity per month, or a simple flat fee for a set level of speed – and was officially instituted February 1st. The new policy also means smaller ISPs will have to pay more to…
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IT HAS COME TO OUR attention that a headline of ours last week has caused some misunderstanding.
Last week, the office of Industry Minister Christian Paradis issued a press release noting he was taking part in a pre-budget round table discussions with leaders from the information and communications technologies sector in Toronto.
It was one of a series of planned round tables that also included a stop earlier this month in Montreal. At the meetings, the Minister said that he is seeking to engage private sector stakeholders on how best to ensure that…
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