New wireless players call for review of tower sharing policy

OTTAWA—Industry Canada’s tower sharing policy should be tweaked so that incumbents and new wireless players can reach sharing agreements more quickly, new entrants Public Mobile, Wind Mobile and Mobilicity said Tuesday at the Canadian Telecommunications Forum in Ottawa, hosted by Insight Information. “I’d ask the incumbents how many towers they have shared, the answer is very, very few if any,” Mobilicity's chief operating officer, Stewart Lyons, said during a panel discussion about the "state of play" in the wireless market. “That’s just objective evidence of failure in that policy.” Lyons said the company has “40-plus requests out there” for tower sharing but it has not “made too much headway” on them. Industry Canada released its arbitration rules and procedures for tower sharing in November 2008. According to the policy, disputes over tower sharing must be resolved through negotiations in which both parties must share information and exchange proposals. In the event that negotiations fail, the dispute goes to arbitration. Due to the high cost of building towers, new entrants often want to share wireless infrastructure with the incumbents. But speaking at the conference Tuesday, all three of Canada’s new wireless players said Industry Canada’s policy has failed to create an efficient process because it allows incumbents to dispute proposals and cause delays. “Tower sharing is exactly the right idea, but the actual practical implementation of it makes it unfeasible in terms of the ways they have been trying to throw roadblocks to inhibit our success and being slow in that,” Bruce Kirby, Public Mobile’s vice-president of strategy and business development, said. “To try to push through makes it much too slow to build out a network. The practical effect has been essentially no tower sharing at all.” All three new players said at the panel they are considering sharing towers between them and that some discussions are under way. According to the Industry Department’s approximate arbitration timelines set out in the policy, the maximum time for the arbitration process is 98 days. But Kirby said the process should be resolved within days or weeks instead of months. Lyons agreed, suggesting shorter timelines for the arbitration process. “The whole thing should be enforced in a much tighter timeframe,” he said. Lyons also took issue with the government’s choice of arbitrator, who is often a legal expert, not an engineer. “The arbitration should not be a formal, legal-style arbitration process. It should be arbitrated by someone with engineering knowledge in the department who basically looks at it and says yes or no and then just deals with it, because otherwise it’s not going to move forward,” Lyons said. Kirby said he supports engineers as arbitrators. The process is often slowed down if the arbitrator lacks an understanding of the technical issues involved in tower sharing, he said. “An arbitration process is a terrible way to resolve those issues because you’re taking someone who doesn’t understand the issue and asking them to figure out the answer,” he said. Dennis Béland, Quebecor Inc.’s senior director of regulatory affairs, said by email that the company is not entirely satisfied with the current policy. “We agree that the rules are inadequate when an operator expressly chooses to stonewall, as has sometimes happened. In these cases, the length of time required to conclude an arbitration—six months from the initial offer to share to the arbitrator's decision—is too long,” he wrote. Béland said Quebecor would review with interest any proposal to streamline the process. Telus Corp. spokesman Jim Johannsson told The Wire Report in an email Tuesday that it’s standard practice across the industry to share towers whenever possible. “We have tower sharing arrangements in place on more than 800 towers today. However, only five of those tower sharing arrangements involve new wireless entrants,” he said. Johannsson said Telus has responded to 100 per cent of the inquiries it has received to share towers with new entrants, and sometimes the delays are due to technical issues. “We have been able to find space on our towers to support approximately 50 per cent of those requests and are now awaiting responses from the new entrants on the engineering and construction aspects of the antennae installations,” he said. “In some cases, we have been waiting approximately a year for responses. Ken Engelhart, Rogers Communications Inc.'s senior vice-president of regulatory affairs, said in an interview that the tower sharing negotiating process is “easy and fast.” “Some of the new entrants don’t really want to go on the towers at all. They’re playing games,” he said. “They either decline them or they accept them, and then they let them expire, and then they reapply.” Engelhart said new entrants want to build their own towers, but under the existing regulations they are first required to put in a request to share a tower. He could not say how many towers Rogers is sharing with new entrants, but described the number as an “awful lot.” But Globalive Wireless chairman Anthony Lacavera, whose company operates the Wind Mobile brand, said during the panel discussion that Industry Canada should incentivize tower sharing to ensure incumbents move forward in the process. “It comes down to economics in my view. There isn’t an economic framework that incentivizes people to behave in a way that is cooperative in this area,” he said. “There needs to be a cooperative effort … There’s obviously all kinds of benefits for us and the incumbents ... We just need the incumbents to play ball.” Lacavera said Industry Canada could also offer incentives for municipalities to assist in the tower sharing process. Lyons said in an interview following the panel that Mobilicity also supports creating incentives to encourage tower sharing. But Bell Canada spokeswoman Jacqueline Michelis said in an email that the company follows Industry Canada’s policy and does not see the need for incentives. Engelhart said incentives are already in place for the incumbents because new entrants pay to use the infrastructure. kfournier@thewirereport.ca

New wireless players call for review of tower sharing policy

News | November 10, 2010

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