Ryerson Professor Catherine Middleton submitted comments to the CRTC’s usage based billing review that shared some international experience.
Perhaps most helpful was her reference to Australia:
The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission suggests that effective competition is characterized by rivalry in pricing and services, requires low barriers to entry for new providers, and enables competitors to hold “a reasonably sustainable market position.”
However, citing the CRTC’s recently released Communications Monitoring Report, Paragraph 12 of her comments assert that that “non-incumbent /competitor ISPs” hold just 6% of the market. In fact, the CRTC’s report shows that the major telephone companies had just 37.6% share. The 6% figure ignores the 56.4% by cable companies which cannot be combined with telephone company share. Surely the 62% share held by non-telephone company industry participants would be considered to be “a reasonably sustainable market position.”
I noted some other statements that might have drawn some questions from the CRTC, had she participated in the oral proceeding. For example, the comments assert
Taking the availability of fibre-to-the-home services as an indicator of innovation, with less than 1% of broadband Internet subscribers using a fibre connection, Canada is not a leader in providing innovative services.
Personally, I would not have considered the use of FTTH technology as an indicator of innovation, but rather an indicator of investment. As the CRTC’s monitoring report indicates, about 75% of Canadians have access to internet services at greater than 50Mbps, and nearly 20% of Canadian households have access to more than 100Mbps services. Both of these are substantial increases over the previous year.
Further, a reliance on OECD data would obviously not get my support, but there is a perspective that simply does not agree with the CRTC’s own data:
with just 6% of the market, non-incumbent/competitor ISPs in Canada have had minimal impact on consumer choice, pricing and the development of innovative services.
The CRTC’s figures show substantial changes in pricing [see Table 5.3.3], network development [Table 5.3.5] and availability of alternative networks [Table 5.3.4]. One cannot simply ignore the competition between telephone companies and cable companies. The submission refers to DSL and DOCSIS 2.0 as current generation while considering the broadband capabilities beyond these technologies as next generation infrastructure.
As Canadian Internet service providers build out next generation networks, it is essential that the regulatory environment continue to promote competition and ensure that Canadians have a choice of differentiated, innovative service offerings. In order for this to happen, competitive ISPs must remain in the market. The conditions in place in the wholesale market today will influence the nature of competition in provision of next generation Internet services tomorrow. It is essential that the CRTC preserve the viability of competitive ISPs so that they may continue to challenge incumbents and encourage the development of better Internet services for all Canadians.
It seems to me that the evidence shows that facilities based ISPs have been investing in these “next generation” technologies on the basis of inter-platform competition, far more than the competitive influence by independent ISPs. If the premise of the argument – that competitive ISPs encourage development of better Internet – doesn’t hold, is it no longer essential for the CRTC to preserve their viability? Is it the role of a regulator to preserve competitors or competition?
Dear Mr. Goldberg :
I always read your blog with considerable interest, but on this particular issue, you are dead wrong, because you are confusing the concepts of technological and business competition.
If, for example, Bell and TELUS are competing with each other in introducing new technologies such as FTTH, DOCSIS xxyy and so on, those are certainly positive steps.
However, they do nothing to address the far larger and more serious issues of overpricing, terrible customer service and (probably) illegal and (certainly) unethical, “bundling” of unrelated services so as to destroy smaller, more specialized competitors and maintain the ILEC / local cable company “last mile to the home” duopoly, which currently plagues this country and gives us one of the most expensive and least customer-centric telecom environments in the developed world.
TRUE competition, which is the ONLY thing that keeps large incumbents such as Bell, TELUS, Shaw and Rogers on their toes, can only come about in a business environment with multiple alternative service providers. It is properly the CRTC’s business to set rules so as to promote such an environment. Anything less risks Canada remaining as an overpriced, customer-hostile, telecommunications backwater.