By Denis Carmel
GATINEAU – Back in the fall, Vidéotron stopped offering its retail high-speed Giga Internet services arguing that the final wholesale third party internet access rates imposed by the Commission in August 2019 made it impossible for the company to affordably offer the service to anyone at all.
It then asked the CRTC for permission to withdraw its wholesale equivalent service rates, therefore making impossible to resellers to offer that service using Videotron. Even though there was no take-up yet to this service on a wholesale basis, TekSavvy objected Videotron’s application.
One of its arguments is that since the Federal Court of Appeal imposed a stay on the final TPIA rates, Videotron’s economic argument does not make sense at this point.
“According to TekSavvy, Videotron must not be allowed to de-standardize its aggregated Giga Service in order to construct a narrative of harm that supports its own arguments against Telecom Order 2019-288, against reasonable wholesale rates, and, ultimately, against competition itself,” the CRTC decision recounts.
However, “the Commission’s policies do not require that a provider offers services at the wholesale level if it does not offer those services at the retail level. Videotron does not have to demonstrate or prove that it would be affected financially if it continued to offer wholesale services in order to have the right to withdraw or de-standardize them, as TekSavvy presumed.”
Of course, this discussion was happening before the Covid-19 pandemic where network capacities have become stretched and are challenging the TPIA competitor’s capacities.
To that effect, CNOC has asked Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science & Industry provide: “A funding mechanism to subsidize 50% of incremental wholesale capacity costs paid by independent ISPs to incumbent carriers for the duration of the Covid-19 crisis. This will allow wholesale ISPs to waive overage charges like the incumbent carriers have, without incurring excessive costs,” their March Letter to Minister Bains read.
“With more than one million Canadians relying on independent ISPs for their Internet service, the Covid-19 situation has translated into unprecedented levels of traffic on the networks, which is steadily increasing on a daily basis… This poses a huge economic challenge, if not addressed, that could erode CNOC members already thin margins to the point where their businesses are no longer sustainable.”
