The consulting firm of Lemay-Yates was commissioned by the 4 biggest cable companies together with Allstream and Primus, to prepare a study of international regulatory regimes treatment of VoIP. The report was attached to the submission of the cable companies in the CRTC VoIP reconsideration proceeding. In the report’s summary, the authors note:
A significant difference between Canada and other countries including European countries, derives from the fact that, in these countries, the underlying physical infrastructure (namely the local loop) is a different market segment from local calling services.
This sounds somewhat consistent with the solution we proposed last year – unbundling the access from the voice application. Examine the state of competition for the access link separately from the application riding on the access.
Our approach did not require a mandated unbundling of voice from the local loop. We suggested that the loop could continue to be regulated as a bottleneck facility. If any applications, including voice, are bundled with the loop, then the CRTC’s bundling rules would apply. However, if applications are not bundled with the loop, then there is no reason to apply economic regulation to the application, which is fully competitive.
Such an approach allows technical neutrality, while the regulatory analysis is done on the basis of proper decomposition of the component parts. This approach accommodates wireless and wireline in a consistent manner.