Ericsson issued surprisingly strong quarterly results today which seems to indicate that not all equipment suppliers are feeling the same level of pain.
Ericsson has now beaten the street for the past 3 quarters. Will it be able to close out the year in the same manner?
Ericsson Canada president Mark Henderson will be returning as a keynote speaker at The 2009 Canadian Telecom Summit in June.
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Ericsson, Canadian Telecom Summit
There are three ways to appeal a CRTC decision.
The first and most common approach is to apply to the CRTC to review its decision and ask that the Commission varies all or some of the conclusions. To get the CRTC to even review the decision, you need to demonstrate that they made an error in law, made an error in fact, failed to consider something or that the circumstances have changed since the original evidence.
The second channel is to seek leave to appeal with the Federal Court of Appeal. The Court will deal with legal issues that arise from decisions, such as questions of CRTC jurisdiction.
The third option is to ask the Cabinet to review the decision and either overturn the decision, rewrite all or part of it or return the matter back to the CRTC for the Commission’s reconsideration with a direction based on policy.
In the case of Decision 2008-1, dealing with the use of deferral account funds for broadband expansion, all three courses of appeal were launched. Interestingly, the appeals came from consumer groups who wanted more of the money returned to subscribers and from incumbent phone companies who wanted more of the money to be used to pay for their rural broadband expansion.
Earlier this year, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the original Decision. That would be strike one, except that the Supreme Court agreed in late September to hear an appeal of the Federal Court of Appeal’s decision. So the court challenge is still alive.
On Friday, the CRTC denied the review and vary application that had been submitted by TELUS, and supported by Bell.
the Commission’s determination in Telecom Decision 2008-1 to order a rebate of the remaining funds, rather than to allow for additional process for the submission of new communities, was consistent with ensuring efficient and effective regulation. In the Commission’s view, this negates the regulatory burden and industry uncertainty that would result by initiating another public process to consider new broadband expansion proposals from the ILECs.
The regulatory route for the appeal is now closed. The umpire’s call on the judicial route has gone to the video replay booth for review.
As to the political route, it remains to be seen if the federal cabinet has an appetite to play ball by overturning the CRTC.
Update [December 23, 3:20 pm]
Cabinet has rejected the appeal. The only channel remaining open at this point is the Supreme Court.
In the next few days, Prime Minister Harper will be naming his new cabinet to lead Canada’s 40th Parliament.
No doubt, the new Ministers will ask their senior departmental bureaucrats to identify key priorities.
How will Industry Canada respond?
As I wrote last week, the Conservatives had a number of telecom related planks in their platform, dealing with anti-spam legislation and rural broadband. There were other consumer protection initiatives and a discussion of strengthening the powers of the CRTC and the CCTS.
The Minister of Industry has responsibility for telecom policy and the Telecommunications Act, while the Minister of Canadian Heritage has responsibility for broadcasting and the Broadcast Act. There are some who are calling for a new converged Communications Act which would bring all activities regulated by the CRTC under a single umbrella.
If we are opening up the Telecom Act, what about moving forward with implementing more of the recommendations of the Telecom Policy Review Panel? Or any of our other task forces and review panels?
In the list of priorities, where does relaxation of restrictions on foreign ownership fit?
The leaders of the opposition parties said all the right things in their concession speeches Tuesday evening. But will a sufficient spirit of bi-partisanship in the House emerge to enable effective progress in this minority government?
A regular reader and I corresponded this week and he shared some interesting thoughts related to the announcement this past weekend for the government to invest $500M over the next 5 years in rural broadband. We were also looking at the article in Tuesday’s Globe and Mail about Rural Broadband? A chicken-egg question.
What kind of capacity is reasonable for our tax dollars to subsidize? I would love to have unlimited broadband, but I would also like to see an emergency room doctor in less than 4 hours.
The Telecom Policy Review Panel described a program called U-CAN, the Ubiquitous Canadian Access Network that had two fundamental guidelines: funding based on a competitive bid process and on the basis of least cost.
Recommendation 8-13: The U-CAN program should provide subsidies to broadband network providers by means of least-cost subsidy auctions.
Recommendation 8-14: Auctions should be run for large service areas at a time, in order to increase efficiencies of service provision. These service areas should be designated in consultation with provincial or territorial governments, after assessing current and planned coverage of existing broadband network operators.
By definition, the projects that are seeking government funding are unable to produce a reasonable rate of return. As CAIP president Tom Copeland says in the Globe article:
Phone, cable and, in some cases, local hydro companies will run broadband cable wherever there are enough users to achieve an acceptable return on investment.
So how do we decide how much capacity to engineer for communities that don’t meet this test? Today, they can only access broadband over satellite connections.
It would seem that rural networks are likely to encounter more capacity limitations than those in urban centres, given the more limited (and more costly) access to internet backbone facilities in remote regions. As such, rural networks are even more at risk of having capacity exhausted by heavy users. Do we apply network management controls to ensure that the capacity is fairly distributed among all of the users in these communities?
Given the economics of rural networks it is not an acceptable answer to say that the network operator will simply have to build much larger capacity to meet the demands of all users, since this will require even more of a government subsidy.
Government funding is finite. The more government money that goes into building extra capacity, the fewer communities that can be subsidized. So it would seem to be a matter of public policy for us to agree on what should be reasonable capacity – “reasonable” being defined as something less than “unlimited”, in order to maximize the number of Canadians that can get access to any form of terrestrial broadband subsidy.
Once we have crossed over to agreement on that point, it seems that we would then have to agree on how to ensure that a few heavy users in a subsidized community should not be able to exhaust the limited resources to the detriment of the rest of the community.
As my reader wrote:
If network operators have no choice but to apply some “reasonable network management” tools to ensure that all their users have a fair chance to use the network (which the community and the public have funded for them), doesn’t that mean we not debating whether to control bandwidth-heavy usage at peak hours but rather how to do it fairly for all users, large and small?
By the end of this month, the CRTC is expected to release its decision on CAIP’s complaint about Bell Canada’s network management practices on wholesale internet.
We’ll watch to see if the CRTC launches a public notice to examine the practice by all ISPs when it releases its determination.
The CRTC has officially launched its proceeding to examining broadcasting and new media.
In effect, the proceeding is looking at how Canada’s broadcasting system is affected by new delivery mechanisms, such as the internet and point-to-point transfers to mobile devices, as contrasted with over-the-air and cable.
The Commission is focusing on responses to six main themes:
The CRTC has a New Media website. There are a couple of research studies that were commissioned by the CRTC that can be found there: Changing Channels, that I referred to in a blog post last August, and TV or Not TV, Three Screens, One Regulation, prepared by Eli Noam of Columbia University.
In CRTC parlance, new media refers to broadcasting content over non-traditional broadcast distribution facilities. In other words, this proceeding, issued under the banner of the broadcast side of the CRTC, should be of interest to all telecom service providers and internet service providers.
Comments are due on December 5 and there will be an oral public hearing in Hull beginning on February 17, 2009.