Feeling confident in the wake of winning their VoIP appeal, Bell, TELUS, Sasktel and Aliant filed a joint appeal of the Local Forbearance Decision from the CRTC.
With all of the OpEds in the newspapers over the past few weeks, we knew an appeal was coming. The VoIP appeal took almost a year (including an election and new government to take power) for a decision. Today’s appeal asks for a response in 90 days.
Phone companies feeling frustrated? No question. But I think I would have slept on the press release overnight before sending it out. The language is a little harsh – especially for a combined company press release.
I just wonder what is to accomplished by using language in the press release like referring to the CRTC’s “inability or unwillingness to reform telecom regulation” and how “it is out of touch with today’s market realities.” Of course, the quotes are unattributed, so all four companies have ‘plausible deniability.’
We’re waiting to get confirmation that Barrett Xplore has also appealed a CRTC decision to the Cabinet. As we reported earlier, we expected the Deferral Account Decision to be appealed.1
It all adds more gunpowder to the fireworks that we’ll be seeing next month at The Canadian Telecom Summit.
1 Update: Barrett Xplore will be filing its appeal on Tuesday (May 16)