On Friday, the CRTC had a brief hearing to adjudicate a dispute between Videotron on Bell over inside wiring.
The history of dispute goes back to early 2006, when Bell filed an application requesting Videotron to discontinue its practice of requiring cable telephone customers to disconnect Bell’s high-speed Internet services. The CRTC process was temporarily suspended while the parties tried to resolve the dispute through negotiations. A little over a year ago, in December 2006, the Commission was asked again to intervene.
About 10 months later, following a national consultation on whether a new network interface device should be installed into homes, the CRTC issued a decision last November, determining that it would not set a national policy mandating a standardized network interface device, because of a lack of evidence of its necessity.
Recognizing that Bell and Videotron were still unable to agree on disconnection processes for single family homes, the two parties presented their case to a panel of 3 commissioners on Friday. Fundamentally, the problem is that cable and telephone wires often enter the house in different places. From a cable company’s perspective, whichever inside household telephone jack is closest to the cable modem will become the cable telephony network interface device, but first they have to disconnect the inside wire from its connection to Bell’s network.
Bell appears to be concerned that it often has to roll a truck to reconnect service, if the customer wants to switch back or if the house is sold – it would obviously prefer to have that all done remotely.
When I read the Bell file and the Videotron file, as well as the two replies [Bell / Videotron], I am surprised that Bell is sticking with a request for Videotron to install the kind of network interface that the Commission already ruled wasn’t needed as a matter of national policy. It would seem to be contrary to a general regulatory policy of technological neutrality.
I suspect this adjudication is going to be turned around pretty quickly. We’ll watch for the Commission’s ruling.