GATINEAU – Tuning into the CRTC’s usage-based billing hearing on Monday morning, you may have thought that the Commission was dealing with urban planning issues around road congestion rather a billing model for wholesale Internet services. Several parties tried, at times convincingly, to rely on streets, side streets, on-ramps and cars on a road to parallel wholesale traffic congestion, where network investments would be required and just how those costs should be recovered.
After a somewhat technical exchange among the Commission, independent ISP group CNOC, and Bell Canada on network topology and what the independent ISPs actually pay for the use of, Rogers Communications interjected with an urban street analogy in the hopes of clarifying the picture.
CNOC is saying they’ve paid for the traffic on Main Street, which means they can put as much traffic as they like on Elm Street and Maple Street, explained Ken Engelhart, Rogers’ senior vice-president of regulatory affairs.
“Well wait a minute. No. You paid for Main Street, but Elm Street and Maple Street are going to cost us money to augment and you’re not paying for that,” he said while trying to help to explain the Bell position. “That’s what this whole debate is about. Bell is trying to make the point that in a distributed access network, it’s not a pipe and if you try to describe it as a pipe, you’re making a mistake. When (CNOC says) we’re paying for the whole capacity, why can’t we use the whole capacity? That’s just not correct when you’re not talking about a single pipe.”
Shaw Communications was also on the stand in rebuttal on Monday, reiterating that it is largely indifferent to the wholesale billing model. Instead, it favours the volume-based approach, but said that it is willing to accept the 95th percentile method if directed to do so. It noted, though, that the latter would impose additional costs for billing and implementation.
