TORONTO – While he didn’t name names, one of the newest players in the telecom space in Canada appear to be having problems dealing with a certain western MSO.
At a Monday session during the Canadian Telecom Summit entitled VOIP Pioneers – Early Results, Matt Stein, vice-president of new technology and services with VOIP provider Primus Canada, expressed his frustration with customer issues that are peculiar to the west.
“The vast majority of our quality issues are from Alberta and British Columbia,” he said. “An overwhelming amount comes from those provinces and while I won’t name the company, it isn’t Telus.”
Primus, and other VOIP providers’ telephony services ride on the high speed Internet connections customers have with existing ISPs such as Telus, Bell Sympatico, Rogers Cable and Shaw Cable. The VOIPers therefore rely on those established companies’ high speed Internet backbones and have been complaining about the level of signal quality they sometimes get.
It’s these types of situations that made Vonage vice-president of marketing Joe Parent softly question the CRTC’s May 12th VOIP regulatory decision which left cable companies unregulated in the space, just like all the rest of the VOIP newcomers. “Do we have a cats among the pigeons marketplace?” he asked.
Cable companies, he added may have “even more incentive to be more disruptive than the ILECs.”
Later in the question and answer portion, session moderator David Craig, from PricewaterhouseCoopers, came right out and asked the panel members (which included representatives from AOL Canada and Telus) if it’s difficult dealing with Canadian cable companies.
“We are seeing a lot more challenges in a certain area (B.C. and Alberta) than compared to other areas – much more than could be expected given the distribution of our customers,” affirmed Stein, who added that he wished the CRTC would have, in its recent VOIP regulatory decision, said more about a cable requirement to provide quality of service.
The decision confirmed third party access to cable nets and calls for specific language allowing voice providers, but made no promise about a level of service quality to be provided to those third party resellers.
Paren said that if his company ever ran up against resistance or persistent problems, he would just call upon the company’s U.S. experience, “where a good public beheading is usually good enough to make people fall in line.”
– Greg O’Brien
