The CRTC has asked telecoms to provide information about wireless plans aimed at Canadians who only need service occasionally or on an emergency basis, as part of its upcoming wireless policy review. It said in a letter to participants to that review process that “additional information on occasional-use or emergency-use wireless plans would ensure a more complete record.” The Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) had previously asked the regulator to ensure telecoms offer plans for consumers who don’t need regular wireless service. The CRTC declined to do so, saying that would...
Quebecor Inc.’s Videotron has purchased a local cable company operating in the same area where the CRTC recently ordered Quebecor rival BCE Inc. to provide Quebecor with wholesale internet service.
In mid-December, the CRTC said Bell subsidiary Cablevision du Nord de...
The nation’s highest court has quashed a 2016 decision by the CRTC to ban...
In an ongoing dispute between BCE Inc. and CloudWifi Inc. over whether...
Ken Smithard, the president of Cogeco Inc.’s Canadian telecom division, is leaving the company after 20...
The latest portion of the CRTC’s Communications Monitoring Report, focused on the mobile retail market and released Monday, shows that wireless industry revenues have gone up, and while smaller...
The CRTC has denied an application by BCE Inc. subsidiary Cablevision du Nord de Québec to eliminate its wholesale internet service, and ordered the company to sell that service to Quebecor Inc.’s Videotron. On Monday, the CRTC said in two decisions that Cablevision must keep offering the third-party Internet access (TPIA) service and must revise its tariffs. In 2018, Videotron told Cablevision, which operates in the Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Que. region, that it was interested in its TPIA service. “Despite negotiations between the parties from January to May 2019, on 15 May 2019,...
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has delivered a greatly expanded set of telecom and internet-related...
The CRTC has responded to requests to divulge the methodology and confidential data in the Competition Bureau’s report on mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), giving the bureau and telecoms who...
Quebecor Inc.’s Videotron said Friday it has chosen Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. as its equipment supplier for the deployment of LTE-A and 5G networks. “This partnership is the result of an extensive selection process to...
A judicial review application to the Federal Court challenging Innovation, Science and Economic...
Satellite service provider Telesat Holdings Inc. has named Andrew Browne as its new chief financial officer on Thursday, following the retirement of Michel Cayouette. ...
As the new Parliament gets up and running following the election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to a minority government, there are also some changes to the ranks of parliamentary secretaries as well. The Prime Minister’s...
After a November Competition Bureau report endorsed a limited version of...
The Federal Court of Appeal has dismissed a case brought forward by...
The CRTC is asking all telecoms about what barriers exist that would hinder their ability to deliver the basic service objective for internet access established three years ago. A consultation document, posted Tuesday, asks the telecoms to “identify potential barriers and/or regulatory solutions to building new facilities or interconnecting to existing facilities in order to extend broadband-capable networks more efficiently into underserved areas in Canada.” The deadline for submissions is January 24. The consultation will zero-in on barriers to wholesale access to transport...
OTTAWA — Federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien told reporters...
The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) is teaming up with an artificial intelligence platform that it hopes will produce insights, which would otherwise be missed, from a...
Defendants in a failed reverse class action certification motion brought by Voltage Pictures LLC are filing an appeal against part of the decision by the Federal Court to withhold legal fees they say...
The CRTC Monday announced that it will ask telecom companies to implement a...
Michelle Rempel Garner, Conservative MP for Calgary Nose Hill and her party’s newly minted critic for industry, said Friday that Canada’s wireless rates are...
Quebecor Inc.’s Videotron will argue in Federal Court later this month...
A cap on the amount of 3.5 GHz spectrum any one company can hold in the upcoming auction is not, on its own, “sufficient” for smaller rural-based wireless internet service providers to compete, according to the trade group...
The work of the chairwoman heading the review of the broadcasting and telecom acts turned out to be more time-consuming and complicated than the government initially planned for, according to a memo obtained through Access to...
The new Liberal minority government repeated its promise to lower wireless...
Telus Corp.’s outsourcing and call centre operation Telus International...
As part of its review of Canada’s wireless market, the CRTC has launched a survey to find out how Canadians feel about their service providers. “The survey results will help determine whether further action is needed to...
BCE Inc.’s proposed acquisition of French-language Groupe V Media...
The Conservative Party has announced its shadow cabinet ahead of the Dec. 5 return of the House of...
OTTAWA — Brian Masse, the New Democratic Party MP for Windsor, is staying on as his party’s critic for telecommunications and innovation. Masse has been in the portfolio almost consistently since he was first elected in 2002.
Alexandre Boulerice will take over the...
Despite improvements in customer service that have lowered customer...
Rogers Communications Inc. is asking the CRTC if it can delay the implementation of several sections of the newly minted Internet Code, scheduled to come into effect in January of 2020. The company...
Quebecor Inc.’s cancellation of its gigabit internet service is akin to a soccer player diving, or feigning injury to draw a penalty, TekSavvy Solutions Inc. is arguing in an intervention to the...
At a Vancouver press conference Tuesday, the federal and British Columbia...
Consumer advocacy groups are urging the CRTC to require incumbent wireless providers to make low-cost data plans a condition of operation in the latest round of submissions to the regulator’s review of the mobile wireless industry. The Coalition for Cheaper Wireless Services (CCWS), the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) and OpenMedia filed additional comments in a second round of interventions preceding the regulator’s wireless review hearing early next year,...
Internet service provider TekSavvy Solutions Inc. has appealed a Federal Court order requiring ISPs to...
The Competition Bureau is officially endorsing a policy that would temporarily mandate access to the incumbents’ network infrastructure by mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), the watchdog said Monday. The recommendation...
Voltage Pictures LLC and Rogers Communications Inc. have both agreed to drop their appeal and cross-appeal, respectively, against a decision by the Federal Court to award the telecom costs to dig up personal information of alleged...
The CRTC’s decision to lower wholesale rates for its aggregated regime...
OTTAWA — New Public Safety Minister Bill Blair indicated Wednesday he is...
In a precedent-setting decision, a Federal Court judge has ordered internet...
In a letter to U.S. President Donald Trump’s economic and foreign affairs teams, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 14 other organizations have told the American government that they are concerned...
The movie studio that has for years sought to sue...
NORTH BAY, Ont. — Higher rates telecom providers must pay to connect to hydro poles in Ontario are especially onerous in rural areas, Angela Lawrence, vice-chair at Canadian Communication Systems Alliance (CCSA) and general manager at Hay Communications Co-operative Ltd., said at a rural broadband conference this week. Internet service providers have been fighting rate increases by the Ontario Energy Board for the past year and a half. The province-wise rate increased from $22.35 to $43.63,...
NORTH BAY Ont. — The CRTC announced on Wednesday that it is now accepting...
U.S.-based investment company Digital Colony has made another major purchase of Canadian telecom-owned assets this year, announcing on Wednesday the acquisition of fibre internet provider Beanfield Technologies Inc. ...
Wednesday saw a flurry of legal moves to overturn a CRTC decision that cut...
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice has ruled against BCE Inc. in favour...
The country’s largest TV service providers are appealing an increase in the over-the-air distant signal retransmission tariff imposed by the Copyright Board in December, in part because they argue the decision doesn’t take into consideration the new realities of modern...
The forthcoming Internet code from the CRTC would make it far too hard for Xplornet Communications Inc. to disconnect customers that haven’t paid, the company argues in a filing to the regulator...
In a joint resolution, passed in Prince Edward Island last month and announced in Gatineau last week, federal, provincial and territorial information and privacy commissioners are calling on their respective governments to...
A few months ahead of the introduction of the CRTC’s Internet Code, scheduled for Jan. 31,, a grouping of the largest telecom companies in the country are asking the regulator to make the code apply...
Despite the summer’s volatility in the wireless market, with a rush of new offerings in “unlimited”...
Quebecor Inc. executives confirmed on Thursday that its previously...
TORONTO — The aggressive way incumbent telecom companies reacted to the...
Rogers Communications Inc. and the University of British Columbia said they have powered the first fully-functional 5G “smart campus” to test applications for the next-generation network. The campus includes 5G towers and...
TORONTO — Smaller, wholesale-based internet service providers may be...
A company that says its privacy-focused software app can tell employers exactly how their employees are using their phones at work said it hasn’t received support for its...
The objection to the new phone financing plans from the likes of the Competition Bureau is based on an incorrect understanding of device financing arrangements, according to Rogers Communications Inc.’s reply in the CRTC’s...
The CRTC has told six small telecoms who have refused to join the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) they have until Dec. 16 to explain why. It said WISP Internet...
Quebecor Inc. CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau wrote a letter taking the Liberal...
Cogeco Inc. is looking forward to the upcoming spectrum auctions in 2020, especially since Innovation, Science, and Economic Development put in place new tier 5 spectrum licensing rules this past summer. The new licenses,...
Ahead of the CRTC’s wireless review early next year, and on the heels of a report showing Canada is among the highest-priced jurisdictions in the world for data, BCE Inc. executives on Thursday focused on the declining cost of data to push the point that regulatory...
Canadian mobile wireless data prices are falling precipitously, according...
OTTAWA — NDP leader Jagmeet Singh said Wednesday that lowering wireless...
As the Liberals head back to Parliament following the Oct. 21 federal election, they’ll be returning to...
Eighty-eight per cent Canadians have a smartphone, 45 per cent of Canadians check their smartphones at...
BCE Inc. says it is willing to share information with critics of its plan...
The CRTC’s public hearing in its review of mobile wireless services, which was originally scheduled to be held in January, has now been pushed back to Feb. 18. The regulator said in a notice Monday that the Competition Bureau...
In a conference call with analysts Friday, Shaw Communications Inc. executives declared that the company...
Following the release of the Rogers Communications Inc. quarterly results Wednesday that were accompanied by falling stock prices, Desjardins analyst Maher Yaghi asked in a research note if the impact...
The CRTC said Thursday that companies and organizations which offer free WiFi on their premises and providers of some Internet of Things connections don’t need to register with the regulator. It opened a consultation in 2017 on its rules requiring resellers to register with the commission. In its decision, the CRTC determined that services offered without an explicit charge or those that are “offered on a temporary basis only to individuals located on the reseller’s premises” are exempt. That means, for example, coffee shops or other businesses or organizations providing free...
BCE Inc.’s Quebec vice-chair, Martine Turcotte, will retire in January 2020, the company announced...
The public-private partnership known as ENCQOR 5G has now made mmWave spectrum available to participants. ENCQOR 5G was first announced in 2018 as a 5G laboratory of sorts, funded by $400 million from the federal government...
Wireless revenue for Rogers Communications Inc. struggled over the summer, primarily due to a...
The CRTC has told Quebecor Inc.’s Videotron it can’t withdraw its gigabit internet offering from the market, after the company did exactly that earlier this month. Videotron told the CRTC on...
Some groups are calling for the CRTC to put the brakes on a request by BCE Inc. to test out an artificial intelligence system for blocking nuisance calls, saying not enough is known about the way the program would collect data from users and that it raises privacy concerns. In July, Bell asked the CRTC if it could conduct a 90-day test of a system for blocking “certain known, verified, fraudulent scam voice telephony calls” on its networks. The CRTC had initially ordered the telecom companies in December 2018 to set up call blocking system for numbers that don’t conform to...
In its intervention to the CRTC’s consultation on the emergence of...
The Canadian chapter of the Internet Society (ISCC) is looking to embark on...
Despite Conservative leader Andrew Scheer indicating throughout this...
The Federal Court of Appeal has decided it will not hear a case brought by Quebecor Inc. on handing over set-top-box (STB) data to the CRTC. In the latest in a months-long dispute between...
Quebecor Inc.’s Videotron has shut down its 1 Gbps internet service, effective Oct. 11.
The move...
The Conservative Party has now specified its plan to make web giants “pay...
Federal party leaders agreed Thursday evening in the last debate of the...
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development will host a public consultation next month on its proposed “unified approach” to the taxation of the world’s biggest tech companies. A document released by the...
The Canadian Network Operators Consortium has filed its arguments in Federal Court against Telus Corp.’s appeal of a CRTC decision that would temporarily suspend a speed cap affecting wholesale-based service providers. The CRTC initially meant to prohibit those smaller ISPs from offering speeds faster than 100 Mbps if they didn’t move to the new disaggregated wholesale internet service regime. The CRTC then lifted that speed cap in March. Telus successfully convinced the Federal Court of Appeal in June to look at the case on the basis that the CRTC deviated from a standard...
The RCMP Tuesday announced the arrest and charge of two people in connection with a 2018 data...
The Centre for Digital Rights, the non-profit founded by former BlackBerry Ltd. co-CEO Jim Balsillie, is asking the CRTC to agree that political parties engage in what is effectively commercial...
GATINEAU — Conservative leader Andrew Scheer refused to say whether he...
GATINEAU — Federal party leaders faced off in the only English-language debate to feature all six...
Telus Corp. is asking the Supreme Court of Canada to review a decision by the Quebec Court of Appeal that determined the early cancellation fees it charged its customers years ago were “abusive.”
The June decision by Quebec’s highest court found, under the...
As politicians take aim at telecom affordability in this fall’s election...
During the first French-language debate of the federal election campaign,...
Six years after first filing suit alleging BCE Inc. infringed on its patent...
Telus Corp.’s announcement that it is buying ADT Security Services Canada, the Canadian arm of the U.S. home security services company, for $700 million is a wise move that will position Telus for...
The Liberal Party platform, released Sunday, includes promises of new regulations for Canadian content on...
The temporary nature of the decision by the Federal Court of Appeal to...
BCE Inc., Quebecor Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc. are arguing in...
After an urgent plea by BCE Inc. requesting the Federal Court hold an oral hearing on the deadline of a CRTC order to implement new wholesale internet rates that it is protesting, Bell and other...
For BCE Inc. the industry-wide lurch toward unlimited data plans in the mobile wireless market was “premature,” because it will cut the amount of revenue generated from data overages in the short term.
“We didn’t start this, we followed,” Bell chief financial...
