On Monday, the CRTC rejected an appeal by Bell Aliant / Bell Canada that had questioned the way the CRTC calculated competitor share of the business services access market.
The way the calculations go, the CRTC has the ILEC provide its number of buildings in a wire centre with at least one high speed connection and each competitor provides its number of buildings with at least one high speed connection. The CRTC rules, set up in Footnote 7 of Decision 2007-35, say that at least 30% of the buildings need to have a competitor presence, but the method of calculation is described as:
competitor network presence is the ratio of buildings connected to the competitors’ highspeed DNA capable network, divided by the total number of buildings connected to all service providers’ high speed DNA capable networks. Multiple competitor connections to a building are counted as one connection, while ILEC and competitor connections to a building are counted as two connections.
You can get some strange but consistent results from this formula. Let’s say there are 25 buildings in a wire centre and the ILEC is in all of them and there is a competitor in 10 of them. One might think that this surpasses the 30% threshold (10/25 = 40%) but that isn’t how CRTC arithmetic works. According to the CRTC, the competitor presence is 10/35 = 28.6%.
The CRTC’s rationale is that the calculation is the same without having to consider whether the competitors are in the same buildings as ILECs – an important potential labour saver in doing the calculations.
For example, in a wire centre in which the competitors’ high-speed DNA-capable network is connected to 10 buildings and the ILEC is connected to 30 buildings, adopting Bell Canada et al.’s approach would lead to an assessment of competitor network presence ranging from 25 percent to 33 percent – 25 percent under a scenario in which the buildings reached by the ILEC and the competitors are entirely exclusive of each other and 33 percent under a scenario in which the ILEC’s high-speed DNA network is connected in all buildings reached by the competitors.
However, the CRTC calculations do consider whether multiple competitors are in the same building (and counts them just once). Let’s say in this CRTC example there are two competitors, each connected to 5 buildings. The results will range from 14% to 33%, depending on whether the competitors are mutually exclusive of each other.
According to the CRTC in its rejection of the Bell / Bell Aliant appeal:
The Commission notes that from the perspective of market power analysis, an approach that provides a consistent assessment for an identical number of competitor network connections, regardless of the particular configuration of the networks of the ILEC and the competitors, is to be favoured over an approach that does not.
It is not clear to me that the CRTC’s math is any more consistent. The Commission’s methodology also needs to consider the configuration of the competitor networks.
Just not sure how clearly this all adds up.
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