In an interview yesterday, I was asked why Cabinet didn’t go further and order lessened regulation on the entire VoIP regime.
As Cabinet noted, it is a non-trivial exercise to determine the division between digital voice and VoIP. But it is very easy to examine distinctions on who controls the access and whether there is any bundling or ability to exercise control on the application itself – for example, “obtain the permission of the network provider to offer the service”.
So, Cabinet ruled that “access‑independent VoIP services are very different” and could easily be regulated using a different regime.
But there remains a question as to why Canadian carriers, ILECs and CLECs alike, will be subject to more onerous obligations than US resellers like Vonage and others. Why is the CRTC still going to require equal access for Canadian carriers and not for others?
What does equal access mean in an environment of access independence? Let’s look at an interesting scenario. I live in Toronto, and buy an access-independent VoIP service from a carrier, with a Montreal number for my kid at McGill and a New York number for my family in the US to call. I take the adapter with me on a business trip to Europe and call Hong Kong. What does equal access mean? How will any of the carriers know where I am at any point?
The answer is that the ILECs just didn’t put forward convincing evidence of the technical challenges associated with defining equal access in an access-independent VoIP environment. The record at the CRTC in the proceeding that led to the approval of Bell Digital Voice (Decision 2006-11) shows the promise of a technically viable solution that will be ultimately be meaningless in the marketplace.
It is what I like to call the ‘Iridium Syndrome’. Engineering solutions solving a non-existant problem resulting in massive flushing of cash.
Left with no evidence to the contrary during the VoIP reconsideration, the CRTC could see no reason to change their ruling in September:
The Commission considers that the Companies have not provided any specific additional evidence regarding the difficulties and costs associated with the provision of equal access for access-independent VoIP services.
It is too bad that there wasn’t more focus on the terms and conditions associated with access-independent VoIP.
As written in the Order in Council:
Whereas the Governor in Council considers that retail local access-dependent and access‑independent VoIP services are quite different from each other;
…
Whereas the Governor in Council considers that VoIP is a relatively new and rapidly evolving technology used to provide telephone services and that it is in the public interest to enable efficient and timely deployment of innovative new technologies by all telecommunications service providers
So why would we still subject Canadian carriers to the equal access obligations for their version of access-independent VoIP? If VoIP is new and rapidly evolving and quite different from regular voice service, wouldn’t it make more sense to dissociate the obligations that were designed for a circuit-switched world?
I’m concerned that Cabinet’s ruling may not go far enough. Is it sufficient for carriers to have won pricing freedom but still be handcuffed by the legacy CLEC obligations, especially when foreign resellers have no such encumbrances?
We’ll have more thoughts tomorrow on how this can be fixed.
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CRTC, Cabinet, VoIP, Mark Goldberg