By Ahmad Hathout
Telus and Bell have agreed to end applications to the CRTC that each claimed the other was making it difficult to lease space on their fibre networks.
According to a Friday letter from the CRTC, Telus and Bell submitted letters to the regulator earlier this week to withdraw their applications. The regulator, in turn, voided an interim order that forced Bell to revert system updates that Telus claimed was causing its wholesale access issues in Ontario and Quebec.
“Commission staff expects that any processes and procedures associated with the wholesale provisioning of HSA will apply to all wholesale customers equally,” the CRTC said in the letter.
Telus fired the first shot in January, when it filed an undue preference complaint regarding Bell’s system that it claimed “drastically degraded” its access to the wholesale fibre network. Bell alleged in response to Telus’s complaint that the Vancouver-based telecom had itself been doing what it is claiming: making it difficult for competitors to launch on its aggregated fibre network, which is mandated by the CRTC.
Bell, which claimed its own system was better than Telus’s, formally filed a Part 1 application earlier this month requesting similar relief the CRTC gave Telus on February 5, which forced Bell to rollback the updates. Bell claimed Telus was still using manual ordering systems, which it said made impossible the scaling of its planned launch of internet services in western Canada. Bell said it would make a request for final relief at a later date.
But in a letter on February 17, the CRTC ordered Bell to file its request for interim and final relief jointly to allow the parties to “understand the issues.” The CRTC said in the letter that it expected Bell to file its request for final relief “within the next 10 days.”
Bell had been using Telus’s network to launch a trial to its customers in Kelowna, with a planned full launch in the region in January before it said it ran into this issue with Telus.
Now that the two parties have an agreement, a Bell spokesperson told Cartt: “We intend to proceed with a full launch in BC and Alberta as soon as possible.”
Telus did not respond to a request for comment.
