CRTC ruling on CCTS membership may be difficult to enforce

The CRTC’s ruling two weeks ago requiring all telecom service providers to become members of the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunication Services (CCTS) could be hard to enforce because the commission lacks a working list of providers, telecom consultant Mark Goldberg says. “I’m not sure there is a centralized list of all telecommunications service providers that’s maintained by anyone. The CRTC has various lists but, for example, there is no single list of all Internet service providers in Canada,” Goldberg, head of telecom consultancy Mark H. Goldberg & Associates Inc., said in an interview. The CCTS was created in December 2007 to resolve consumer complaints about unregulated services, such as telephone, mobile wireless and Internet. On Wednesday the CRTC released a decision requiring all service providers to become CCTS members for a five-year period beginning in January 2010. But the ruling is short on details, leaving analysts and CCTS board members to question the viability of its implementation. More details about the decision will be released in January. Goldberg said he foresees problems with the implementation and enforcement of the ruling, adding that it will be difficult to track down all the service providers currently operating in Canada. There is also an extensive number of non-facilities-based service providers, or resellers, which Goldberg says the CRTC has limited power to control. “If we consider all companies that provide Internet service to the public for a fee, this ranges from people who provide monthly services, to hotels that provide service on a daily basis,” he said. “ that’s a definitional problem, that’s a notification problem and that’s an enforcement problem.” The CRTC could not confirm whether it has a complete list of all of the country’s small service providers, although it does have a list of CCTS member providers. It also remains unclear whether the mandatory membership ruling includes large telcos, such as AT&T Global and Verizon Business Services, which provide services to the Canadian operations of large, international companies. CCTS commissioner Howard Maker said in an interview he is unsure of whether these multinational service providers will be required to participate. “It depends how the CRTC defines the class of service providers that are to be included. It may carve out exemptions for those that don’t serve consumers or small business customers because typically that is the market that we serve, so those businesses may not need to participate,” he said. The CRTC’s decision in January will alter the number of new members that the CCTS is to expect; at the moment, predictions range from a couple hundred to thousands. The decision will also contain a larger review of the CCTS following a CRTC hearing on its mandate in late November. “Both the membership issues and the other issues will have to go before our board for a discussion of what changes will have to happen at CCTS in order to accommodate them,” Maker said. Despite the increase in membership, Maker said he does not necessarily expect a large influx of complaints. “When the commission set up the membership structure that was present before the hearing at the initial proceeding back in 2007, there was evidence that it covered 95 per cent of the industry and its consumers,” he said. “It’s hard to know to what extent that number is still right and to what extent that adding that additional five per cent is going to impact our numbers … many customers deal with small providers by choice, for any number of reasons and often it has to do with customer service.” Amongst service providers who are already CCTS members, reaction to the ruling is positive. “It’s about time that the CRTC made this ruling,” Stewart Lyons, chief operating officer at Mobilicity, said in an interview. Lyons added that he believes the CCTS’s current funding model, which imposes a revenue-based fee on members, is fair. “Larger players have a larger share of the market, a larger share of the complaints and pay more of the CCTS costs, which are based on a percentage of revenue and the number of complaints each provider receives,” he said. Marc Choma, director of communications at the Canadian Wireless Communications Association, also welcomed the ruling. “It is an appropriate move by the CRTC because all consumers across the country should have equal access to the Commissioner’s resolution process,” he said. Bell Canada supported mandatory membership during the CRTC hearing. asmith@thewirereport.ca

CRTC ruling on CCTS membership may be difficult to enforce

News | December 14, 2010

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