Frequent readers know that I like to highlight unusual regulatory proceedings.

In today’s chapter, I want to look at an application to expand the use of the 8-1-1 dialing code. N11 numbers are a very limited resource: there are only 8 numbers that can be assigned. We are all familiar with 9-1-1 emergency dialing. 6-1-1 is used for reaching your phone company’s repair service; 4-1-1 is local information. Five years ago, I wrote about the CRTC’s assignment of 5-1-1 for travel information. The full list is available from the Canadian Number Administrator website, which indicates that 8-1-1 is currently assigned for “Non-urgent Health Care Telephone Triage Service.”

In my area, this service isn’t available. Only 4 provinces are currently using the 8-1-1 code and consumers have a very low awareness of its assignment. This past July, the Canadian Common Ground Alliance filed an application with the CRTC to gain access to the 811 code for Call Before You Dig services, as a matter of public safety.

The application received broad public support, including that of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and there have been endorsements by two federal Cabinet Ministers: Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver.

Minister Toews wrote:

Public Safety Canada recognizes that the 811 number currently provides a valuable service to the public by offering around-the-clock health information and non-urgent medical advice. Broadening this service to include “Call Before You Dig” would help mitigate unnecessary risks to the public, and reduce interruptions of services provided by critical infrastructure sectors.

Minister Oliver spoke at a the September 29 meeting of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, saying:

I know that you are doing your part in maintaining your safety record. I know you fully understand that a good track record in safety and environmental performance helps to create a distinct competitive advantage. This is why we support your campaign to create an “811” number for Canada’s “Call Before You Dig” program.

It is unusual for Cabinet members to weigh into CRTC proceedings; in addition, another federal tribunal, the National Energy Board, voiced its support for the initiative.

The primary cause of disruption to critical infrastructure, such as telecommunications or electrical facilities and energy pipelines, is accidental excavation by homeowners or contractors. It has been 6 years since the CRTC approved the application by Alberta Health and Wellness for the assignment of 8-1-1 “for access to non-urgent health care telephone triage services” [Telecom Decision 2005-39]. Although it was the applicant for the original CRTC assignment, Alberta is not offering the service. Just a few months before the CRTC approved 8-1-1 for health services, the FCC designated 8-1-1 as “the nationwide number for contractors and others to call before conducting excavation activities.”

The provincial health agencies are less enthusiastic, despite the failure by most of them to activate their own service. Even those provinces that have no plans to activate 8-1-1 seem to want to hoard the dialing code and block any other groups from using the scarce numbering resource.

The file is now closed. The CRTC will now need to determine whether to expand the scope of 8-1-1 to include Public Safety, and bring Canada’s assignment into consistency with the US.

It has been more than 37 years since I was last in Moscow. I went to Russia in March of 1974, when Western relationships with a cold-war era Soviet Union were being thawed by hockey summits. Our grade 12 history teacher found a special way to bring life to a curriculum looking at the “History of Revolutions.”

We had a broad cultural immersion that week. I recall learning to drink vodka shots in a loud disco in our hotel in Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was then called), arguing about whether (current Canadian Senator) Frank Mahovlich was really Russian. I recall the fun we had with their mispronunciation of his name, claiming it was really Махолович [Maholovich], so we responded with our index finger raised:  Махолович один, Канада один. I still proudly display my collection of pins from trading Bazooka chewing gum with people on the streets.

There were other extra-curricular activities that are best shared at a later time.

Next Sunday, I am going back to a very different Moscow, en route to the Baikonur Cosmodrome for the launch of the world’s most advanced communications satellite. It has been a while since I have been this excited about a business trip. Xplornet is partnering to dramatically increase the amount of capacity available for rural and remote broadband service, enabling far faster speeds at a more attractive price point.

As I mentioned last week, Xplornet has a special website (4gsatellite.ca) that allows you to share in the excitement as launch day approaches. The space shot itself will be streamed to a live feed on that site.

I don’t expect to be arguing about hockey in the hotel bar, but one of the Russian phrases we learned 37 years ago will still come in handy: “водки, пожалуйста”.

Often, we speak of regulatory decisions as fair if each of the parties are equally upset.

It is tough to be a regulator in a competitive environment. Actually, I’m not sure it was loads of fun to be a regulator in the days of monopoly rate setting.

But, it has to be extra frustrating trying to understand when the expectations keep changing.

Back in July, Michael Geist accurately predicted the outcome of the CRTC’s review of over-the-top (“OTT”) video, released last week. At the time, he wrote:

The participants in this consultation fall into three main groups: those seeking competition, those who want more regulation, and those who want de-regulation.

What remains is the next step for the CRTC. It seems certain that there will be a full scale hearing, but the question is whether the Commission will cave to pressure from some groups for something immediately, or wait until the next new media hearing round in 2014.  Given the lack of actual evidence – this has been a fear-finding exercise rather than a fact-finding one – the CRTC should surely label this a watching brief and wait until 2014.

“Given the lack of actual evidence… the CRTC should surely label this a watching brief and wait…” Amazing call 3 months ahead.

In the report, the CRTC used language that paralleled the categorization of parties into 3 groups:

Many stakeholders proposed policy options to deal with the challenges associated with growing OTT content consumption; these generally fell into three large categories based on either regulatory or market solutions: a) lowered obligations for regulated entities, b) creating regulatory obligations for OTT providers and c) maintaining the status quo.

The accompanying news release said “While not containing any clear evidence…”, agreeing with the July article. The report itself even used Geist’s expression “watching brief” – a term that is rarely used by the CRTC, having appeared only 6 times in decisions, reports or policies prior to last week.

So I was a little confused by Geist’s article in Sunday’s Toronto Star. In that article, he again acknowledges the “lack of evidence”, but somehow draws a conclusion:

The consultation confirmed that consumers are gravitating toward services that offer on-demand access to video content at a price point far below that offered by conventional pay television and broadcaster services.

No such confirmation was made by the CRTC. The Commission found “that consumer adoption of OTT services is real and growing” but did not see evidence of harm to the traditional broadcast system. The word “price” appears only once in the report, and that was in the introductory reference to the Notice of Consultation. The report therefore did not draw the conclusion or even provide such a confirmation of “gravitation” to low priced on-demand access.

What the Commission said was “significant change is underway in the communications sphere” and it plans to continue to gather information, with a repeat of the fact-finding exercise next year. Fact-based decision making is what we should expect from our regulator.

The Star article says:

Indeed, rather than offering broadcasters and creator groups another chance to make the case for regulation, the CRTC should instead be closely examining the potential barriers to online video services from vertically-integrated media companies that combine broadcasting and Internet services and hold the power to undermine the nascent competition.

For example, Internet plans with expensive data caps can be used to increase the indirect costs of online video services when compared with on-demand video services from cable and satellite companies.

Yet, there was no evidence of consumer harm from internet pricing practices. Wouldn’t such evidence have been highlighted in the July blog post or this week’s Star article? It seems to me that there needs to be some clear evidence of a problem before the CRTC becomes one of the only regulators in the world to regulate retail internet business models. To the contrary, the CRTC report said “many parties stated that Canadians are the biggest online video consumers in the world.”

It seems that the CRTC got this one right by ignoring the call to sit on the sidelines until 2014.

Given the fast pace of change in this environment, the Commission intends to maintain a watching brief on OTT, and conduct financial data collection and another fact-finding exercise in May 2012 to determine if the scenarios put forth by parties with respect to potential regulatory impacts and opportunities have materialized. It expects that at that time stakeholders will be able to provide rigorously collected data, including public opinion research, internal customer surveys, historical revenues and expenses associated with OTT services, market intelligence, qualitative and quantitative evidence with respect to the state of closed captioning and described video for OTT programming and other such quantitative evidence, that will assist the Commission in better evaluating the impacts and opportunities offered by this environment. In addition, as part of its watching brief, the Commission will focus its annual consultation with the broadcasting industry primarily on the subject of OTT.

Everyone, consumers, content providers, content creators, ISPs, vertically integrated companies, independent broadcasters and all other stakeholders and observers alike, will have a chance to gather and submit evidence next summer.

The Commission was clear about its focus on its statutory mandate:

The Commission considers that currently it is best to allow the OTT market to continue evolving, better measurement tools to emerge and entities that contribute to the policy objectives of the Act to take advantage of the many opportunities in this new environment.

What exactly is wrong with that approach?

As Ricky Nelson sang, if you can’t please everyone, you’ve gotta please yourself.

In April, the world celebrated the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic spaceflight, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Later this month, a Proton M rocket is scheduled to lift off from that same facility, carrying with it Viasat-1, the fourth generation satellite that will power dramatic capacity expansion to provide rural broadband in Canada.

ViaSat-1 can support customer download speeds of up to 25 Mbps; its capacity is greater than the capacity of all current North American broadband satellites combined. Xplornet has secured all of the Canadian Ka-band capacity on this advanced satellite, and it expects the satellite service to be available to Canadians late this year.

The value of this new capacity was demonstrated with the 16 hour outage of Telesat’s Anik F2 satellite yesterday.

A game-changer in terms of ubiquitous broadband access in Canada, ViaSat-1 will allow for previously unavailable speed and bandwidth economics, and will provide Canadians in its footprint, which includes many remote areas, the opportunity to get a broadband connection that is truly fast and affordable.

Xplornet has a special website (4gsatellite.ca) that allows you to share in the excitement as launch day approaches. The space shot will be streamed to a live feed on that site.

I’ll be writing more as the countdown continues.

The CRTC released the results of its first fact finding exercise, examining over-the-top (OTT) video services [press release, full report].

The results are said to be inconclusive, but the Commission plans to continue to monitor the file, planning another review to be launched next May – about a year after the initial review. Its key findings:

• The traditional broadcasting system continues to support Canadian programming even as services emerge to deliver content to Canadians in new ways.
• While consumption of online and mobile programming is growing, current measurement tools are unable to accurately reflect trends in consumer behaviour.
• There is no clear evidence that Canadians are reducing or cancelling their television subscriptions. Online and mobile programming appears to be complementary to the content offered by the traditional broadcasting system.
• Canadian creators are taking advantage of the digital environment to produce innovative content and to reach Canadian and global audiences. Canadian broadcasters and distributors are also launching their own online and mobile programming services.
• Some online programming services have established viable business models and are competing in the marketplace for programming rights and viewers.
• Internet and wireless networks may encounter capacity constraints and be challenged to support increasing consumption of media content.

The CRTC’s conclusion went beyond what was generally reported. The Commission said that the parties that called for regulatory obligations to be imposed on providers such as Netflix had successfully demonstrated that consumer adoption of OTT services is real and growing. But, they did not submit evidence that this adoption was actually harming the traditional broadcast system.

The Commission considers that the record of the fact-finding exercise demonstrates that significant change is under way in the communications sphere, with potential for further change. New technologies, service providers and consumer behaviour underpin a transformation that is characterized by greater choice, a global marketplace and new opportunities for Canadian creators. Such change is also creating uncertainty with respect to established business models and associated support for the creation and presentation of Canadian content, as well as for investment and innovation in advanced communications infrastructure.

The Commission intends to conduct another fact-finding exercise in May 2012 to see if any of the scenarios of potential regulatory impacts show signs of materializing. The results of that exercise would be expected around this time next year, at which time the CRTC might then continue to watch the file or consider launching a review of the New Media Exemption Order [as recently affirmed] or launch a review of potential policy changes to increase the regulated players’ flexibility to respond to the activities of OTT providers. Those reviews could only get started in the fall of 2012, with conclusions in 2013. As such, we can expect no changes for the next couple years.

The CRTC is sending a message that it wants stakeholders to provide more “rigorously collected data,” to assist the Commission in evaluating the impacts and opportunities offered by this environment. Its concluding paragraph calls for better quantitative evidence next year – a statement that this year’s information fell short of a standard that might have allowed the CRTC to draw more effective conclusions.