OTTAWA – The CRTC has turned down a request from the Canadian Network Operators Consortium Inc. (CNOC) to merge the retail component of usage-based billing (UBB) with the residential proceeding.
In a letter to the Commission earlier this month, CNOC said that if the business wholesale and residential wholesale proceedings are kept separate, parties will have to repeat many of their submissions in both proceedings, “resulting in confusion, unfairness, and inefficiency”.
The group also argued that the parties participating in the business wholesale proceeding are at a disadvantage because that proceeding does not include an oral hearing; that separate proceedings will result in the regulation of ILEC business wholesale high-speed access services being based on less scrutiny than the regulation of third-party Internet access or ILEC residential wholesale high-speed access services; and, that by keeping the two proceedings separate from one another, the Commission is depriving CNOC and other parties of the ability to fully canvass the topic of value-of-service pricing.
CNOC’s request was also supported by the British Columbia Broadband Association and Vaxination Informatique which also filed letters with the CRTC this month.
But the Commission dismissed those arguments in a letter on Thursday, and officially denied CNOC’s request. The hearing to examine wholesale residential high-speed access services is scheduled to begin on July 11, 2011 in Gatineau.
