Telus RnV in 867 traffic stimulation ruling should be dismissed: Iristel

Telus Inc.'s request for the CRTC to review its decision that the company "unjustly discriminated" against Iristel Inc. should be thrown out and the original ruling upheld, Iristel has told the regulator. "It is important for the Commission to understand the impact that TELUS’ conduct had on Canadians living in the North and those trying to contact them," Iristel argued in a Monday intervention to a review-and-vary request from Telus filed last month. "Contrary to TELUS’ claim that the impact was de minimis, the impact was very significant and negative." The dispute over traffic simulation goes all the way back to 2016, when Rogers accused Iristel of engaging in traffic stimulation, prompting the regulator to order Iristel in December 2017 to cease the use of 867 area code numbers to connect callers to a Toronto-area radio station audio stream. In August 2018, Telus and Iristel filed dueling Part 1 applications, with Telus complaining that Iristel’s traffic stimulation had resumed, and Iristel countering that Telus was causing calls from Telus users to Iristel users to fail. In addition to ruling in August of this year that Telus had unjustly discriminated against Iristel, the CRTC also ruled that Iristel had granted itself an undue advantage by allowing the use of 867 numbers by “certain customers based in distant locations,” increasing connection costs for others and generating revenue for itself. In the review-and-vary application, Telus said that it did not “discriminate” against any one set of customers. “Each customer was treated like the others,” Telus wrote in the application. The argument, Iristel wrote in its intervention this week, should be dismissed because Telus "clearly discriminated against those customers that had a need to call Iristel’s 867 numbers, pointing to the case of a cancer patient living in the Northwest Territories who was unable to receive calls from a hospital in Alberta with details about her surgery. Iristel wrote in its intervention that Telus' claim that the impact of its capacity restrictions was "de minimis" is "outrageous." "Iristel does not consider the impact on Ms. Hagan and her family of TELUS’ restriction of capacity on certain toll transit circuits to be de minimis."

Telus RnV in 867 traffic stimulation ruling should be dismissed: Iristel

Brief | December 17, 2020

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Telus RnV in 867 traffic stimulation ruling should be dismissed: Iristel

Brief | December 17, 2020

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