Bell asks CRTC for ‘holistic’ rules on traffic pumping

BCE Inc. wants the CRTC to implement new rules governing traffic pumping, which would put the onus on any telecom accused of artificially inflating traffic to prove they’re not engaged in the practice. “Much like in the United States, our proposed solution has the benefit of shifting the burden to the person who knows best why traffic is increasing and allows them to justify the increase,” Bell said in a Part 1 application filed Monday. The request comes in the wake of a dispute between Rogers Communications Inc. and Iristel Inc. over the issue of traffic pumping, also called traffic stimulation. In November, Rogers accused Iristel of attempting to profit from deliberately driving up the volume of phone calls to the Northwest Territories, which Iristel has denied. Under CRTC rules, telecoms are required to compensate each other if incoming phone traffic to one company from a second company is higher than its outgoing traffic to the second company. In its application Monday, Bell said that while it is “largely supportive of Rogers’ initiative to curtail traffic pumping … we believe a more holistic approach is required,” proposing a model similar to that in place in the United States. “We submit that the Commission should ban revenue sharing that is designed to create traffic pumping and that the Commission should allow LECs to amend their tariffs to enable them to take corrective action when circumstances suggest traffic pumping is occurring,” the application said. “Specifically, with regard to the latter, when one-way bill-and-keep traffic between two LECs is subject to disproportionate significant growth, the onus should be on LEC sending the traffic to demonstrate that it is not traffic pumping.” Without such an approach, carriers would have to deal with accusations on a case-by-case basis, Bell said, adding that playing “‘whack-a-mole’ would be very inefficient in terms of enforcement, and it would fail to properly disincent gamers.” Bell said, citing the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), that as of 2011 traffic pumping in the U.S. “caused interexchange carriers to incur $2.3B in charges over the preceding five years,” which has led to “a marked reduction in investment in other areas, such as broadband deployment,” as well as costs being passed to consumers through higher charges for long-distance traffic. “Should traffic pumping become more prevalent in Canada, similar disadvantages in costs and consumer benefits could become apparent,” Bell said. In rural areas of the country, extreme increases in traffic volume would lead to “significant congestion,” and telecoms “would need to inefficiently invest in shared-cost facilities that would not have needed to be augmented absent the illegitimately increased traffic.” Bell said this has already happened in Yellowknife, “where traffic pumping by Iristel has resulted in congestion on the Iristel/Northwestel bill-and-keep trunks installed to handle true Yellowknife traffic,” forcing Northwestel, a Bell subsidiary, to invest in new facilities “to meet demand that is needlessly being inflated, is temporary and illegitimate.” Comments on the application are due on March 2. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca

Bell asks CRTC for ‘holistic’ rules on traffic pumping

News | February 1, 2017

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Bell asks CRTC for ‘holistic’ rules on traffic pumping

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