Best interview and PR placement to emerge from last Friday’s VoIP reconsideration decision? The award goes to John Meldrum, VP and Corporate Counsel at Sasktel. He was quoted by the Regina Leader-Post as saying
Our biggest issue in this whole piece is the marketing restrictions [that] cause artificial market share losses. Those are things that are going to impact the marketplace in terms of less price competition, in terms of the consumers and how they benefit from a competitive market.
Market share losses? In Saskatchewan?
Let’s see now. According to the CRTC Monitoring Report, over the past three years, there has been an erosion of 0.1% of the lines to competition in 2005, which I will concede represents an infinite increase over 2004 and 2003 which saw no local competition whatsoever in Saskatchewan. I note that all of the lines lost (or, should I say “both of the lines lost”?) are in the Regina Local Forbearance Region.
In long distance, Sasktel increased its share up to 84% in 2005, up from 82% in 2003 and 2004.
The Leader-Post says that Mr. Meldrum added there will continue to be
a virtual prohibition of promoting local services and onerous rules on winning back customers that have left us.
Clearly, the operative word in this sentence is ‘virtual’.
It seems to me that you first have to see customers leave, before you even need to worry about winning them back!
Note to Sasktel: If you want to get your VoIP product offering approved, have you tried filing a tariff (on an ex-parte basis – you don’t want your competition to see the rates to early!) that has the price exceed the cost? Ask the folks at Bell. The CRTC will approve it, even with a secret price range. After all, you don’t want all those competitors undercutting your best deal.
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CRTC, Monitoring Report, VoIP, Sasktel, Local Forbearance, Mark Goldberg