Electrical utilities ask CRTC to become MVNOs

An organization representing Canada’s electricity providers has filed a Part 1 application with the CRTC asking for changes to wireless regulations it says are necessary for the roll out of smart electrical grids. The Canadian Electricity Association said the CRTC should allow utilities to become “private” mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) that would only provide service to themselves, and not to consumers. It’s an approach that’s been implemented in the Netherlands and is being considered by other countries, it noted. The application filed Tuesday said the smart grid will include an increasing number of devices, such as smart metres and devices that detect outages and manage the flow of electricity. “For Canada’s current electrical grid to evolve into a smart grid, CEUs need to be able to communicate effectively with the millions of smart devices that will be deployed into the smart grid,” it said. The utilities use wireless communications for a variety of purposes, the application said, such as real-time information sharing and remote monitoring of devices such as smart metres and sensors. But the utilities said they are experiencing “a number of problems under the current regulatory environment that are hampering the deployment of the smart grid in Canada.” One issue is that many of the smart devices contain SIM cards that are locked to a wireless provider’s network, it said. “It effectively prevents CEUs from switching mobile wireless providers as switching would require truck rolls to each smart device, which could number in the hundreds of thousands or millions for large CEUs, to manually swap out SIM cards,” the application said. “The cost of these truck rolls is a serious competitive constraint that makes it prohibitively costly for CEUs to switch to a different , even if a different MNO can provide better terms and conditions for providing mobile wireless connectivity to that CEU’s smart devices.” That also means there is no redundancy to keep the smart grid operating if there is a service outage, since the locked SIM cards prevent the devices from switching to the service of another provider in such a scenario. Another issue with being locked into one provider is extending the smart grid into rural and remote areas where the wireless providers’ networks don’t extend but the utilities’ infrastructure does, the application added.

Electrical utilities ask CRTC to become MVNOs

Brief | October 31, 2018

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Electrical utilities ask CRTC to become MVNOs

Brief | October 31, 2018

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