Rogers Communications denies limiting access to content on wireless portal

The head of regulatory affairs at Rogers Communications Inc. slammed Pelmorex Media Inc. for saying his company makes it difficult for consumers to view a broad variety of wireless content on its devices. Ken Engelhart, senior VP of regulatory affairs at the media and communications giant, said what Pelmorex and others are alleging is “nonsense.” “We’re not gatekeepers, we’re not standing at the gate saying stay, Engelhart told CRTC commissioners during the final week of hearings on new media regulation. “We’re standing at the gate, begging people to come through the gate and they’re not coming.” He notes that after three years of marketing its mobile television service, Rogers Communications has only 5,000 customers to its MobiTV offering. “So I’m very skeptical of these claims that they’re making that we’re somehow keeping people out.” The issue was raised during the commission's new media hearings this week by both Pelmorex and The Score, which accused the wireless carriers of undue preference. Given deregulation of wireless carriers combined with the mobile exemption order, wireless service providers can control access to their network, said Paul Temple Pelmorex’s senior VP of regulatory and strategic affairs. Mobile carriers and ISPs should be treated the same, he added. CRTC commission Michel Arpin picked up on undue preference in his line of questioning. Would Rogers accept such a provision, he asked. “I don’t think it’s necessary, but if you want to do it fine. But you’ve also got to put undue preference rules on them,” Engelhart said. “You should amend their programming licences to say that they are not allowed to unduly prefer one wireless provider over another. So if TSN gives all of their content to Bell and won’t give any to us, we’d like to come to you and complain too.” Michael Lee, chief strategy officer at Rogers Communications, said with the broad availability of 3G networks and devices, gatekeeping is non-starter. “It’s important to recognize in the wireless space, you can get to everything you want from your handset. I can set up a gate, but I’ve got clear space on both sides of me, so you can go around me with a relative amount of ease. It continues, particularly in this next generation network, to get wider and wider as we go forward,” he explained. Engelhart said the commission shouldn’t be drawn into the undue preference debate relative to the wireless carrier’s walled garden approach to promoting wireless content. He acknowledged that a customer could sign up for a package that included content and data charges, but limited the consumer to a specific content. If the customer wanted to view other sites, additional fees would be levied. The Rogers VP said this was an attempt to make content more attractive and to get more people using it. “It’s all turned out to be a bit of a flop. We haven’t been able to attract a lot of attention to our walled garden. Meanwhile, now that there’s 3G, now that there’s devices like iPhones, people are downloading content in buckets from the big wide Internet,” Engelhart said. “So we’re moving away from the thing that Pelmorex was concerned about which was an experimental effort to try and incent users to use the system. We’ve moving to a big wide open pipe so I think a lot of the problems that people are complaining about won’t exist at all shortly.” Pelmorex owns The Weather Network and Météomédia.

Rogers Communications denies limiting access to content on wireless portal

Broadcast | March 10, 2009

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