I have often said that companies aren’t investing sufficiently in their regulatory departments. Regulatory decisions can produce multi-million dollar swings that go straight to the bottom line. There are some who have earned their 2007 bonus already, only a few weeks into the year.
The regulatory folks at MTS Allstream, fresh off a major win on Thursday, filed an application on Friday afternoon calling for changes to the way the ILECs sell their Centrex services. The objective is to open up the level of competition for local services market for the business community. Despite facilities-based competition being readily available for consumers, some argue that it is much harder for telecom competitors to cost-effectively reach businesses.
We wrote about problems with ILEC Centrex rate hikes when they were proposed last summer and when the CRTC gave approval in October. At the time, I said:
There are three ways for Bell to succeed on this filing: unit revenues for Centrex go up 10%; competitors get hurt; and, customers are incented to migrate to Bell’s portfolio of VoIP solutions, some of which may win forbearance under the CRTC’s pending VoIP reconsideration
Allstream has asked for two types of relief in its application:
- If there is a price increase during the contract period, customers would have 6 months to get out of their contract without penalty; and,
- After the first term of the contract has expired, customers can migrate to competitors without penalty.
The first form of relief corresponds to what I wrote over the holidays about System Access Fees:
Either protect customers under contract from system access fee rate hikes or release them from their contractual obligations. That would be fair.
The second part of the relief says, in effect, that customers should be able to go ‘month-to-month’ after the first term is over. Let them shop around. After all, the initial costs of acquiring the customer were recovered during the intitial term.
There is a new sheriff in town. We’ll see what a new Commission has to say about these issues.