TORONTO – Wind Mobile’s complaint to the CRTC over its customers’ dropped calls due to so-called “hard handoffs” is not something the Commission needs to deal with, says Rogers Communications.
As reported by Cartt.ca, Wind wants the Commission to grant it soft handoffs so that its customers aren’t hung up on as they move beyond a Wind network zone as they talk. A hard handoff, for example, means a Wind customer call is cut off as she moves out of out of a Wind network zone into a Rogers area, which is Wind’s roaming partner. A soft, or seamless, handoff would mean the call isn’t dropped as the subscriber moved from network to network while chatting.
Wind says that because Rogers’ Chatr customers can go anywhere, whether they are in their city zones or not, and not see any such dropped calls, Rogers is conferring an undue preference upon itself, a contravention of section 27(2) of the Telecommunications Act.
Rogers notes that Chatr is but a brand and not a carrier – and that this notion of call handoffs has already been dealt with, dating back to the 2008 wireless spectrum auction (the auction where Wind purchased its spectrum).
“The inter-system handoff arrangement sought by Wind was a topic of discussion in the AWS spectrum auction conducted by Industry Canada,” notes Rogers’ November 12 reply to the CRTC. “Following that process, the Department made an express determination not to include this functionality in the mandatory roaming regime that was being established.”
And once the auction was done and Wind moved towards commercial launch, it and Rogers negotiated a roaming agreement which did not include soft, or seamless, handoffs, which are not the norm, insists Rogers.
“Examples of such arrangements are rare (Rogers and AT&T have one in place along the Canada-U.S. border in case of accidental roaming) and Rogers is not aware of any such arrangement that would involve up to six new entrants on the scale that would be required to implement such a regime in Canada,” said the submission.
“Finally, providing the type of inter-system handoff requested by WIND would be extremely complex to engineer and administer. With six more new entrants, all of whom are building out their networks, the ‘border’ between the new entrant’s network and Rogers’ network will constantly be changing, requiring changes to the inter-system network links required to coordinate handoffs between the networks.
“Depending on the speed of the various new entrants’ network rollouts, the initial links could be redundant in a matter of months making cost recovery of investment costs extremely difficult. Network technology changes would also require reengineering of the inter-system arrangements making on-going operation of this functionality very difficult to maintain given the number of carriers potentially involved.”
There is no deadline as yet for the Commission to rule on the complaint.
– Greg O’Brien
