The CRTC has been coming under fire from various corners for not sharing the names of companies violating the telemarketing rules [see Star and CBC coverage].
The process that the Commission is using is somewhat akin to traffic court. So far, the telemarketers have been charged with a violation and have been handed “tickets” which allow them to pay or dispute the charges.
If they don’t pay, then the charges go to a panel of 3 Commissioners who will review the “traffic cop’s” evidence and hear from the accused – if the accused shows up. If no defense is presented, then the panel will determine whether the evidence is sufficient to reach a guilty verdict and then register the decision with the court for collection. Once the CRTC registers the decision with the courts, the names will be disclosed.
When do various legal processes get made public? Do traffic tickets get disclosed prior to a court date? What is the appropriate balance?
Greg O’Brien of CARTT tweeted recently, “The amount of misinformation and utter ignorance about the CRTC and what it does that you can read on the web is stunning.”
He may have been referring to the fascinating engagement that Michael Hennessy stirred up in his refutation of the Dump the CRTC crowd.
CTV and Bell are both owned by Globemedia – posted by Anonymous;
All infrastructure that Bell has installed to bring telephone lines into our house – i.e. the only point at which Bell actually “owns” between a wholesale ISP and a consumer, was paid for by taxpayers. That’s our infrastructure. We paid for the poles, the cables, the installation, the digging and the construction – also by Anonymous;
And the CRTC is letting them do it because it is staffed with ex big telecom executives who still have a vested interest in seeing this happen – by Gerry;
the real problem… is that the CRTC is run by former Rogers & Bell Execs! – by Tammy on Dissolve the CRTC [Facebook];
In the case of Bell, they actually own several media properties including television, internet, they have magazines, newspapers. So, it’s pretty bad to have one company control everything – Dissolve the CRTC founder Michael Lerner, interviewed on CHQR [mp3].
A number of people, including the founder of the Dissolve the CRTC campaign on his CHQR interview, echo a theme that the CRTC is dominated by telecom industry insiders. There are 13 Commissioners and their biographies are on the CRTC website. I am hard pressed to see a preponderance of telco or cableco jobs on their resumes. Where did this perception originate?
At the core of these percolating urban legends I am sensing a failure on the part of the telecommunications establishment – and I use that term in its broadest possible sense – carriers, ISPs, industry associations, regulators, consumer groups, academics and commentators. We are failing to adequately inform.
These voices are students and business people, taxpayers, voters and above all, consumers. They pay all of our wages. Many suffer from being part of a generation that confuses crowd-sourced consensus for true information.
If these impressions are widespread, what is the root cause? How do we address the palpable frustration shared by these voices outside the “system”?
Look beyond the misinformation that these people share. How have we failed to better inform the general public? How do we create a more actively aware and involved populace?
How can policy makers and leaders do better, while resisting the temptation to simply respond to the noise?
The International Telecommunications Society met in Perth, Australia earlier this week. Last year’s conference was in Montreal. There was an interesting paper [pdf, 57KB] examining wireless payment models presented by Sandy Levin, co-authored by Stephen Schmidt of TELUS.
The paper contrasted the benefits of Wireless Party Pay (WPP) models (in use in the US, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore) with Calling Party Pay (CPP) models (in use in most of the rest of the world).
CPP was put in place to encourage the adoption of mobile phones. A mobile phone owner could get a phone and keep it on and receive unlimited calls at no charge. The calling party paid, and the calling party, rather than the receiving party, would decide if the call was worth the price. This did encourage the adoption of mobile phones, but it required a separate mobile code so the calling party knew he was being charged.
The paper notes that CPP has resulted in high rates, especially for call termination, because service providers were permitted to exploit the market power resulting from their call termination bottleneck.
For whatever reason, regulators may have correctly found retail service to be competitive and as such, they did not regulate the prices of retail service. However, regulators in CPP countries have only started to turn their attention to the price of call termination even though it was a bottleneck giving the service provider exploitable market power.
The paper also has an observation about super-normal mobile penetration rates:
What is measured is the number of SIM cards. Partly because of high pricing, many customers in these countries have more than one SIM card. A visitor to a country who purchases a SIM card is also counted. All of this serves to overstate penetration rates in these countries, evidenced in part by suspiciously high “penetration” rates, often over 100%. The significantly lower penetration rates in the U. S. and Canada, where SIM cards are less common and where individuals generally have only one mobile telephone number, are a more accurate measure of actual penetration because it is closer to a measure of the number of individuals who have mobile service than in countries that count SIM cards.
The paper ends with an interesting conclusion. In countries that retain CPP, call termination rates will need on-going regulation because, even though mobile service might competitive at the retail level, mobile service providers can exploit the call termination bottleneck.
When the OECD first released highlights from its Broadband Report in early June, I started to ask about the possibility of the OECD getting it wrong.
Right away, I asked why we blindly accepted the OECD clearly being wrong about Canada’s fastest available internet speeds. To the OECD, Videotron’s world leading DOCSIS 3.0 deployment in 2008 just didn’t happen.
As it turns out, the OECD spends most of its time looking at incumbent telcos probably because most OECD countries don’t enjoy two separate wires into the household. As a result, the OECD frequently ignores the cable industry which, in Canada, has a 15% market share advantage over the so-called “incumbent” phone companies.
The most glaring error – and the lie that keeps getting repeated – was the OECD saying that on average, Canadians are paying $26.11 (USD) per megabit for our broadband. It isn’t true. It is just plain wrong.
How did the OECD mess up so badly on this one?
It turns out that the OECD collected its data by looking at advertisements – in the case of Canada, they looked at 16 ads: 5 DSL offers from Bell, 4 cable ads from Rogers, 4 cable ads from Shaw and 3 WiMax offers from Bell. There was no weighting based on market share; just price divided by Mbps. Add up the results, divide by the number of ads, there you go.
So Canada’s national average was skewed because the OECD happened to base 20% of its assessment on a product like WiMax which has less than a 5% share of the market. The OECD number was further skewed by giving equal weight to ads for Lite and Ultra-lite offers. So, by OECD logic of applying equal weight to each of the 16 ads, about half of Canadians are subscribing to wireless or light services – which have a much higher cost per megabit than the mainstream broadband services.
The OECD took the time to look at 71 ads from Australia, including 8 different offers from Bigpond at 8Mbps and 10 different offers from Bigpond at 30Mbps. There were 22 offers examined from Denmark; 36 from Finland; 36 from New Zealand. Denmark and Finland are countries with populations comparable to the Greater Toronto Area, yet the OECD did more than double the level of research for Finland than all of Canada. New Zealand has an even smaller population.
Australia has two thirds of Canada’s population, but the OECD looked at more offers from a single Australian ISP than it did for all of Canada. Had the OECD included multiple high speed offers from Canadian ISPs, its portrayal of Canada’s price performance would have been much lower. The OECD looked at more offers from a small Danish FTTH company with 6500 customers than it did from Bell Canada.
Why would the OECD use such poor data collection methodology?
Why are members of Canada’s media reluctant to critically look beyond the OECD headline numbers?
Why are Canadian government officials not getting such flaws fixed?
By the way, in the OECD analysis, there are only 4 WiMax prices examined in the whole study: 3 from Canada and one from Norway. The pricing from Canada was lower.
Despite the OECD fixation with some smaller FTTH plays, there was no mention of similar Canadian alternatives like Novus that offer fibre to the premises based services. Yesterday, Novus announced that it was upgrading each of its internet services by 10Mbps, with maximum data rates now going up to 60Mbps.
Update [August 20, 9:30 am]
Economist Suzanne Blackwell of Giganomics Consulting has done considerable work taking apart the OECD report and she has an excellent posting this morning that looks at Garbage In – Garbage Out that resulted in the flawed OECD results. She points out that the CRTC has found our price per megabit to be less than a quarter of what the OECD has reported, putting Canada into the ranks of the world’s least expensive broadband services.
Forbes had an article earlier this week about the slowdown in growth in US broadband subscriptions.
It isn’t a contraction in the market, it is a reduction in net additions. Only 634,000 new subscribers signed up in the US in the second quarter of 2009. Canada also saw smaller activation numbers. Second quarter is said to be generally slow, perhaps because of student outward migration, although the economy may be making this year especially tough.
In the meantime, Rogers launch of its Ultimate 50Mbps product should heat up the back to school market.
Note: the CBC story on Rogers’ Ultimate launch said that Shaw and Eastlink top out at 25MBps and 15Mbps respectively. Since last February, Shaw actually has been offering the fastest broadband on the continent with its Nitro service, operating at 100Mbps and offering 400GB per month for data transfer.
