Bundling and market trials first up in Policy Direction action plan

The CRTC has kicked off a review of general tariff bundling rules and requirements for market trials as the first elements to be re-evaluated under the commission's action plan for the implementation of the Policy Direction. The commission released its action plan and the public notice on the bundling and market trial proceeding on July 11. "This was a very good step by the commission to start this exercise and no big surprises in terms of the rankings of the priorities," Mirko Bibic, chief of regulatory affairs at Bell Canada, tells Network Letter. "My only disappointment is the timing. I find the timing a bit too lengthy and doesn't match up with certainly what we, at Bell, thought was within the art of the possible. We were hoping that all of this would be done by the end of next year." Bundling rules, which will be the first regulatory mechanism to be reviewed, have been a bone of contention for both incumbent telephone companies and their rivals. ILECs have argued in the past for greater flexibility in using and pricing bundles of services, while competitors counter that greater flexibility in bundling rules could lead to ILEC anticompetitive behaviour. As Bibic told NL earlier this year, Bell Canada has been pushing for a change to the way the telecom regulator treats bundles both in the consumer and business markets. "If you've got a bundle that includes regulated and unregulated services, as long as the price of the bundle is at least the price of the sum of its regulated components, then there's no reason for us to have to file anything with the ," he said in May. The market trial rules have also been a bone of contention for incumbent telephone companies because according to current CRTC rules, ILECs have to file information on the public record that competitors are allowed to examine unless there is a confidentiality claim attached. "We don't know if we're going to be offering on a permanent basis, we just want to test things. We want to test pricing points, marketing strategies, and to make us do all the work in advance to get approval is inefficient and there's also the significant issue of...we've got to file this stuff and give competitors potentially a heads up," Bibic says. The imputation test contained in the market trial rules is also an element that irks Canada's largest telephone company. "Let's say we want to do a trial in an area that will continue to be regulated isn't going to be forborne soon....We may want to try out for two or three months an introductory price point that could be in theory be below the imputation test," Bibic muses. "Why should that be a problem, it's just a trial?" Comments in bundling and market trials proceeding are due August 27 with reply comments to be filed with the commission on September 12.

Bundling and market trials first up in Policy Direction action plan

News | 08/07/2007 11:32 am EDT

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