CRTC gives 90 days for talks on wholesale Internet service dispute

The CRTC is demanding that four of Canada’s largest cable companies and small ISPs represented by the Canadian Network Operators’ Consortium (CNOC) work out a dispute over customer service and network reliability at the negotiating table within the next three months. The regulator issued a decision on Thursday on a CNOC complaint from September 2013 in which the small ISPs claimed network providers Rogers Communications Inc., Cogeco Cable Inc., Shaw Communications Inc. and Quebecor Inc.’s Videotron were subjecting third-party providers’ customers to “vastly inferior treatment” when it came to setting up services, maintaining the network and billing. The CRTC said in Thursday’s decision that the unjust discrimination provision of the Telecommunications Act, under which CNOC had made the complaint, was an “unduly narrow lens” through which to deal with broader issues like service complaints, and that CNOC doesn’t have evidence from the network providers to prove that the small ISPs have been discriminated against. “In the circumstances, the Commission considers that allowing the industry to generate solutions is likely the most effective and efficient way to begin to resolve CNOC’s concerns,” the CRTC said in the decision. The regulator said the two sides must negotiate through the CRTC’s interconnection steering committee or their own bilateral discussions and present a report to the CRTC within 90 days describing their progress. Bill Sandiford, president of CNOC, said he was "cautiously optimistic" about the decision despite the failure of negotiations between the small ISPs and the cablecos to bring about a deal in the time since the complaint was filed. "We tried to resolve these issues with the cable companies directly two years ago; it didn't work, and it led to our application," he said. "At this point we can only hope that the commission's guidance and oversight of the process continued attempts to solve the issues with will yield results.” Sandiford said he does not care so much how the service issues are resolved, just that some sort of solution is arrived at soon. “This has been going on a long time,” he said. “We’re confident that in 90 days we’re going to be somewhere on this file.” CNOC isn’t “jumping for joy” at the CRTC’s decision and would have preferred a simple ruling in its favour, he noted. “We’re going to continue to give it the same honest effort over the next 90 days that we’ve been giving it over the last 720 days,” he said. Representatives ffor Quebecor did not respond to requests for comment. In an email, Shaw spokesman Chethan Lakshman said the company valued their wholesale customers and "are confident we can address any concerns or questions" the small ISPs may have during the negotiating process. Rogers spokeswoman Patricia Trott said in an email she believed the decision was "reasonable" and was "confident" that her company would be able to work out the issues through negotiation. Cogeco spokeswoman Nancy Bouffard said in an email that her company will comply with the CRTC’s decision and had no further comment. The CRTC decision laid out the eight issues that the companies must discuss, including the status of installation orders, the trouble-escalation process and notice of changes to the network. The regulator also asked for more information on issues including scheduling and cost of installation appointments, as well as access to service-availability information. “We hope that the cable carriers will see this as a clear signal to negotiate these issues in good faith, to stop stalling and to address these in a way that will respond to the pretty clear complaints of consumers,” Bram Abramson, chief legal officer at independent ISP Teksavvy Solutions Inc., said in a phone interview. In the decision, the CRTC said efficient delivery of wholesale Internet service is “essential” to a competitive broadband market in Canada, and Abramson said he welcomed that affirmation even though the regulator didn’t issue a final ruling on the issues at hand. “I'll admit that it doesn't go as quickly as we would have liked it to,” he said. “There are going to be some consumers that are a little disappointed because this doesn't resolve their problems. It won't resolve them today or next month or the month after that, but the CRTC has been pretty clear that these are issues that have to be resolved.” Abramson said even though the complaint is now more than 16 months old, Teksavvy still has ongoing problems with its wholesale providers, including the time it takes to get new customers connected to the network, the reliability of the service, and getting information about planned or unexpected outages. “Things sometimes get a little bit better, things sometimes get a little bit worse,” he said. “We don't have any predictability. We don't know what's happening because there's no obligation to tell us what's happening.” Part of the original CNOC complaint, he said, was a request for service-level agreements that would enshrine quality-of-service indicators in the financial agreement, with small ISPs receiving price rebates for service problems that aren’t corrected. Similar agreements exist for telephone services, Abramson said, yet because the CRTC does not mandate them for broadband Internet, Teksavvy has been unable to implement any such agreement. “The cablecos are our suppliers and they're our competitors,” he said. “They have every incentive not to enable us to compete too strongly with them.” The CRTC did not rule on the issue of service-level agreements, Abramson noted, but he said he hopes some kind of quality-assurance provisions come out of negotiations. “We're disappointed that this decision doesn't kick-start things in a way that's quicker and more sustainable than it might otherwise have been,” he said. “But we're hopeful that we'll be able to make progress in the next 90 days that we have not been able to make previously because the CRTC has been clear in its decision as to what it now expects in the negotiations.” Lawyer Jean-Francois Leger of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, which filed an intervention in the case, said in a phone interview that it appears the CRTC is “nervous” about making a final ruling in a case involving broad issues such as service complaints without having extensive evidence from the parties involved. “Our sense is that these are business relationships between sets of service providers,” he said. “Where there are operational issues, it may be that these things are better resolved in negotiations than to attempt to obtain, in a single decision, resolution to what are undoubtedly complex operational matters.” Although much of the evidence filed to the commission is filed in confidence, he said, it was clear from the CRTC’s request for more information in the Thursday decision that the factual record was incomplete. “From the commission standpoint, this is probably not something they're comfortable rendering a decision on,” he said. “Service issues are difficult to sort out. There are often many layers of systems and many layers of staff that deal with these operational issues. The outcome in this case is perhaps not surprising, given the complexity of these issues.” Leger said PIAC was pleased to see the CRTC reaffirm the importance of third-party wholesale access in creating competition in the market. “We still consider that competition is somewhat fragile, so we are encouraged by this outcome,” he said. — With reporting by Peter Henderson at phenderson@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

CRTC gives 90 days for talks on wholesale Internet service dispute

News | February 12, 2015

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CRTC gives 90 days for talks on wholesale Internet service dispute

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