Rob Sugar, Canada’s premier Weight Loss Coach according to his fax ads, has the distinction of being the first person to be named as a violator of Canada’s Do Not Call List.

According to the CRTC, he did not make representations to defend the marketing.

He has been assessed a penalty of $4000 and has until September 25 to pay it. If payment has not been received by then, the Commission will certify the unpaid amount with the Federal Court in order to collect.

The CRTC also issued two notices against Peerless Mason, one for roofing and one for waterproofing. Peerless Mason had appealed, saying that they are not telemarketers, but a penalty of $10,000 has been assessed in each of the two cases.

At some of our extended family gatherings, some of us have been known to re-tell a old tale more than once. My late uncle used to say that we either need new stories, or new friends.

I was reading about the concern that consumers are having a hard time making sense of the multitude of different plans and options from the carriers, with some of the same voices making the same complaints. The problem is that I don’t think these stories are representative of today’s reality.

Isn’t choice an indicator of a competitive marketplace? Innovation from carriers, trying to help consumers tailor their packages to meet their needs. Sure, it was a lot easier when all phones were black rotary dial models and there were no features to choose from.

But do we all really want vanilla flavoured mobile service?

A recent column speaks of hidden charges and uses system access fees as the example. I’m not crazy about extra fees myself, but the fees are hardly hidden. And, there are choices out there that have no fees: check out Koodo, Fido and Solo, among others.

I have been shopping for wireless services a couple times this summer and shopped by internet, by phone and in person at company owned stores and with agents. This wasn’t hypothetical shopping, but looking to spend my own real money on real services. The complaint I read about not being able to take your old phone with you when you switch between carriers is pretty lame. I suspect my family members are fairly representative of having no interest in being stuck with an old phone.

There were no hidden charges. I was even walked through a check list to make sure I understood my first bill including all the fees, pro-rated charges, etc. Most of the websites let you see a sample first bill.

As to the perspective that only Rogers has all the cool phones, apparently these kvetchers haven’t heard of the Blackberry Tour, the Blackberry Storm or the Palm Pre which are only available on TELUS and Bell. Exclusive contracts aren’t necessarily a bad thing, as I have written before.

As to the tired old claim (I wrote about that one more than 2 years ago) that North Americans suffer from having CDMA and GSM networks, instead of all carriers using one standard, there are others who would see this as offering consumers yet another choice. We didn’t need government to mandate VHS versus Beta; we didn’t need government to regulate GSM over CDMA.

There really are new stories out there, as more than 1.3 million Canadians who activated a phone last quarter experienced. That is, more than 15,000 people each day who are shopping, finding an offer they like, and subscribing to a new mobile phone service.

You need new stories or new friends to stick with the same old stories. Go shopping and you might get both.

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.

The comments on the When Dogs Ran Free postings and Dissolve the CRTC websites seem to confirm Greg’s observation. Items like:

• 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.