Regulation & Policy: Telus takes CRTC to task on DND contract dispute

Enterprise customers, particularly government clients, will be closely monitoring a Federal Court of Appeal leave to appeal by Telus Corp. Filed at the end of February, the leave to appeal argues the CRTC erred when it arbitrated a contract dispute between Public Works and Government Services Canada and Bell Canada. Telus says the CRTC should have allowed it to present evidence in the case because it was directly affected by the outcome of the dispute. In addition, after deciding on a final offer arbitration process Telus argues that the commission shouldn’t have allowed Bell and Public Works to submit multiple offers and counter offers. On this second point, Telus is pretty harsh in its assessment of the CRTC. “I think it abdicated its statutory duty to set rates,” Ted Woodhead, vice president of telecom policy and regulatory affairs at Telus, told Telemanagement last month. “It strikes me, from what I can see, that they really didn’t concern themselves too much with any of the evidence that was submitted or any of the pleadings. They just wanted to get to a very fast resolution…without due regard to whether what they were doing ended up in setting just and reasonable rates.” Bell Canada told TM in February that Telus had no business being involved in the case. No parties other than Bell and Public Works should have been party to the matter because “this is a factual dispute bilaterally between a service provider and its customer,” Mirko Bibic, senior vice president of regulatory and government affairs said at the time. But this case is more than just about rates. It’s also about how the CRTC handles complex service migration issues involving large corporate customers. How will enterprise now approach telecom service migration? Will they have to insist on longer transition periods? How will that affect the willingness of competing providers to bid on contracts that may be very complex? Will the CRTC’s handling of this case send a chill across the enterprise community in terms of switching telecom service providers? These are questions that will likely remain unanswered for the time being, or at least until the Federal Court of Appeal decides to first hear the case and then rule on whether the CRTC contravened any laws. Traffic shaping at the wholesale level: MTS has a solution In a little more than two months, the CRTC is going to kick off a landmark review of Internet traffic shaping done by the large internet providers. One element of this study is likely going to focus on whether the big ISPs – the facilities-based internet providers – have to manage the internet traffic of their wholesale customers. The matter came to light a last year when Bell Canada began throttling – or managing, depending on whom you talk to – the internet usage of its wholesale customers. They complained to the CRTC at the time that Bell didn’t have the right to do this. Well, the commission ruled in Bell’s favour. Only recently, Bell ratcheted up its network management practices by proposing to impose bit caps and usage-based billing on its wholesale customers. The Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP) explained to TM last month that if this plan is allowed to fly, there would essentially be no difference between the services provided by Bell and those by its wholesale customers. “We’re all working under the same caps. We’re all working under the same pricing structure,” Tom Copeland, chair of CAIP said. “ if we maintain our margins in these services what winds up happening is that we’re charging the exact same thing that Bell is charging.” MTS Allstream Inc says that it has a fix to the wholesale traffic shaping issue. According to MTS, Bell Canada and Telus Corp bundle the access and transport portions of their network together in their wholesale aggregated ADSL (WAA) services, forcing them to have to manage the internet traffic of their wholesale ISP customers. The Manitoba incumbent says that by treating the access and transport components separately, Bell and Telus would no longer be burdened with the headache and cost of managing the traffic of their wholesale ISP customers. “This modification would have the effect of requiring each competing ISP to manage its own end-customers’ traffic, thereby addressing the concerns raised and practices undertaken by Bell to manage its network capacity,” MTS writes in a Part VII filed last week. “Moreover, this solution would not require any changes to the network itself and in fact would lead to a more streamlined and efficient provisioning process for WAA services.”

Regulation & Policy: Telus takes CRTC to task on DND contract dispute

News | April 29, 2009

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