Follows other telecoms asking for change in reporting thresholds
By Ahmad Hathout
Telesat is asking the CRTC to clarify if satellite transport providers are subject to its new outage reporting rules and, if so, to amend them because they are not privy to some of the information the regulator is asking for.
In a review and vary application made public on Monday, the Ottawa-based company said because it doesn’t provide services directly to retail customers, it cannot comply with the CRTC’s new rules that establish a new threshold for reporting to official bodies. It is asking for a new set of reporting thresholds for these types of providers.
Under the new final rules, which were released in September, reporting is triggered when an outage lasts at least 30 minutes and affects 600,000 user minutes, calculated by multiplying the duration of a service outage in minutes by the number of end-users affected by the outage.
The CRTC notes that if a telecom service provider “who provides wholesale services to other TSPs experiences a service outage then the TSP must also include the number of affected end-users for its TSP customers, using a reasonable estimate of the actual numbers if not available.”
But Telesat, which provides only wholesale satellite transport services, said in its application that the commission does not provide any indication of “how a provider of wholesale or enterprise services that are not offered or rated on a per end-user or access line basis could reasonably provide an accurate estimate of this competitively-sensitive information.”
The company does “not have direct information on the number of end-customers served by TSP customers, the nature of the services provided to end-customers by TSP customers, the serving areas of TSP customers, or the number of competing TSPs operating in these service areas, and TSP customers have no legal obligation to provide this information to Telesat,” it added.
Telesat wants the CRTC to clarify that it is requiring all service providers to report the number of affected end-customers, the affected end-customer services and the affected end-customer service area and, if so, adjust to reflect what is reasonable for satellite transport operators.
The company also said it believes the “vast majority” of satellite outages are due to “weather or third-party power outages to earth station facilities which are outside the reasonable control of the satellite operator.”
It is asking the CRTC to confirm that the 600,000 user-minute reporting threshold does not apply to satellite operators that do not serve retail customers directly and, as an alternative, require these operators to report outages that exceed 24 hours if the outage is due to weather or a third-party power outage, and 30 minutes in all other circumstances.
The CRTC said the user minutes and duration thresholds do not apply to “community isolation” events that are defined by the commission as an outage in an area – often rural and remote – with only one telecom service provider, even if these areas are served by satellite services because of the time required to set up that type of connectivity.
But Telesat says it does not have direct knowledge of whether its customers (service providers) are the only providers serving a rural, remote or isolated community to determine whether a community isolation event has occurred.
On that note, Telesat wants the CRTC to amend the decision so that the regulator establishes and maintains on its website a list of communities that quality for isolated community outage reporting.
“It is not in the public interest to require a provider of wholesale satellite transport services to implement costly and likely inaccurate internal processes to, for example, estimate the number of individual end-customers of their TSP or enterprise customers or determine whether there is terrestrial competition in communities served by their TSP customers,” Telesat said.
“Nor should TSP customers be obliged to report competitively-sensitive end-customer information to a wholesale satellite transport provider,” it added. “These obligations would contravene the requirements in the Policy Direction and the Telecommunications Act to ensure that regulation, where required, is efficient, effective and proportionate to purpose, and transparent, predictable and coherent.”
Telesat’s applications follows a change in circumstances since the decision. The CRTC last month delayed the implementation of the reporting rules – which were supposed to go into effect on Nov. 4 – to consider a joint review-and-vary application from Rogers, Bell, Telus, Eastlink, Cogeco, Quebecor and SaskTel.
Those major telecoms recommend that the commission ditch the user minutes threshold and the 30-minute minimum and instead define major outages as those that affect at least 50,000 users over an hour, lowering by 50,000 the user threshold required of – and overall keeping with – the interim regime which the CRTC replaced with its final decision.
If the CRTC insists on user minutes, then they say it should start with a threshold of 1.8 million user minutes.
