ILECs given ok to roll out bundles in small town Canada

Canada's two largest incumbent telcos appear ready to rollout territory-wide bundles in the wake of a CRTC decision granting greater flexibility to price bundles for customers living in smaller regions. In interviews with Network Letter, representatives from Telus Corp. and Bell Canada say they can now offer customers in less populated areas - where local telephony pricing is still regulated by the CRTC - the same bundles available customers in large cities where pricing regulation has been eliminated."What this allows us to do...is to make available in regulated areas the same kinds of bundles that we'd make available in forborne areas," Mirko Bibic, chief of regulatory affairs at Bell, tells NL. Shawn Hall, a spokesperson for Telus, explains that under the old rules, it wasn't possible to market the same bundle in Vancouver and in a small town in the interior of British Columbia, for example. The previous rules made "it difficult for us to offer one package across our entire operating area," he says, adding the decision now allows the company to offer all customers a uniform package. "This makes it easier for us to market those across our entire operating territory and really just frees us from those regulatory shackles. So, yes, it's a good decision," says Hall. "It's a good decision for Telus and it's a good decision for Canadian consumers."In Telecom Decision 2007-111, the commission ruled that ILECs can offer bundles that include local telephony as well as unregulated services such as wireless, Internet access and television as long as the price of the bundle is no lower than the sum of the bundle's regulated components. Practically speaking, an ILEC can offer a quadruple-play bundle (local telephone, wireless, Internet and TV) in a region where its local telephony pricing is still regulated at a price that equals the price of standalone local telephone service. During the proceeding that led to the decision, competitors and competitors' groups argued that adopting this type of pricing methodology would hurt competition. Bibic discounts those arguments as "hogwash". "I would have thought we were well beyond or well passed those kinds of stale arguments by now. I mean that's stuff that used to be argued five, six, seven years ago." Consumers will be protected in those areas, says Bibic, because the commission still mandates the offering of a standalone local telephony service. He adds that if Internet and wireless, for example, aren't regulated by the CRTC now, they shouldn't be just because they become part of a bundle. "The fact is today that in any single area if we bundle ExpressVu with Sympatico, we can charge what we want," he says. "So it's of no concern to the CRTC how we price Sympatico and ExpressVu together, so why should that be any different when we include those two forborne services with home phone service as long as the price of the bundle is no lower than the price of home phone." The Canadian Cable Systems Alliance and Primus Telecommunications Canada Inc. were unavailable to comment at press time. Network Letter will endeavour to report back with their reaction to the bundling decision.

ILECs given ok to roll out bundles in small town Canada

News | November 29, 2007

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