Yak has filed two applications with the CRTC to “protect Canadians against consumer gouging.”

The applications are in response to a new trend among ILEC telephone companies to add network access fees for phone lines that aren’t signed up to monthly calling plans. Most of the telephone company long distance plans have minimum monthly fees as well.

In a press release titled Yak calls recent TELUS fee illegal; Calls on CRTC to remove it, Yak VP Andrew Boone was quoted:

Our phones have been ringing off the hook with customers who are angry and confused about this new fee. They have every right to be angry – this fee is completely unfair to customers, which is why we have taken it to the CRTC to have it removed.

PIAC and the Consumers Association of Canada are supporting Yak’s application.

In one of the applications, Yak asks the CRTC to declare TELUS’ Long Distance Network Access Charge to be “an illegal local rate increase” and asks for remedies including refunds to all consumers that have paid the fees, compensation to competing long distance providers for the harm caused by the new fee and an apology to be inserted into all customer bills.

TELUS introduced the charge on November 1 for all customers who do not subscribe to a long distance service plan. Customers were told

The charge will be used to maintain our capability to provide reliable, high quality Long Distance service to all clients at all times, through infrastructure investment in Long Distance facilities, management of telephone carrier relationships and ongoing operational and business development expenses for Long Distance service.

PIAC was cited in a recent newspaper article complaining about the fee. At the time, a TELUS spokesperson said “From time to time companies need to increase costs for providing services and this is what this is.” Keep in mind, this fee is for people who don’t subscribe to a long distance plan!

Yak’s other application seeks to have the CRTC revisit a decision from earlier this year in which the CRTC removed most constraints that apply to basic toll schedules. At the time of that decision, this blog post commented somewhat presciently that the CRTC missed an opportunity to shut down across the board network access fees.

Yak and Telehop, among some other companies, do not charge monthly fees for their dial-around or pre-subscribed long distance services.

AT&T; has announced that it plans to be out of the pay-phone business by the end of 2008.

The move affects AT&T;’s former SBC 13-state territory. Bell South, which was acquired by AT&T; in 2006, had already gotten out of the pay-phone business.

It is a sign of the growing ubiquity of mobile wireless. From about 2.6 million phones in 1998, pay-phones in the United States have declined to about 1 million phones today. A C-Net news story suggests that some phone booths generate more money in advertising than phone calls.

Over the weekend, I had a discussion asking when we will see substantial reductions in basic residential wireline phones.

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A comment by a financial analyst in Friday’s National Post made me think of an old Canadian Tire ad series: “more than just tires”.

Blackmont Capital Markets was commenting on TELUS’ acquisition of Emergis and their analyst said he was caught completely off guard and doesn’t see the fit.

If you call Telus to buy a phone and after that, they try to offer you an electronic medical record, it just doesn’t jive.

Huh? Is it really possible that a telecom analyst thinks this is a likely outcome of the transaction with Emergis? That TELUS is just in the retail phone business (and presumably the same holds for the other players in the sector)?

Let’s try to look past such an incredibly simplistic perspective.

Surely Blackmont would agree that the health care system could benefit from improved electronic communications? For examples, see my post from 2 weeks ago or take a look at the supplement that accompanied Friday’s Globe and Mail.

So, if you are following along, health care might be an attractive vertical for a carrier to target. How could a telecom carrier help?

Why are diagnostic labs still producing radiological films and using couriers or patients to move them around? Why do we still see faxed lab reports in our files with doctors squinting to read through the poor resolution?

Do you think there might be a systems approach to reduce our health care costs and maybe improve the quality of service delivery?

Maybe Blackmont had been surprised from the perspective that Bell couldn’t make a go of integrating Emergis, so they had trouble seeing the difference with TELUS. I could understand that view – at least intellectually. But to suggest that they have trouble seeing how medical records jive with a retail sale of phones? Either Investor Relations needs to do some educating, or Blackmont needs to learn more about the telecom sector.

I can see the ads in my mind (after the holiday season, of course): more than just phones.

In an article analysing the impact of the new spectrum auction rules on Rogers, Forbes seems to completely misunderstand what is up for grabs in the upcoming Canadian spectrum auction.

Forbes says:

Shares of Rogers plunged on Thursday after a Canadian government agency issued new auction rules that will boost competition in the cable and Internet service industry.

Boosting competition in cable and internet? Shares in Rogers fell, but it should not have been due to future cable and internet competition.

In Canada, potential new entrants will have the best opportunity to win 40 MHz of spectrum (broken up into a 20 MHz slice and two 10 MHz slices) to establish a new mobile wireless carrier.

No wonder John Henderson of Scotia Capital says (in the same article):

The market is overreacting… The auction will have very little impact for the next two years.

This auction is about mobile wireless. While other social and environmental factors may be at play for TV and internet, the auction rules should have no impact whatsoever on cable and internet.

It isn’t surprising that Industry Canada will require mandated tower sharing as part of its new rules for the AWS spectrum.

A series of articles in recent days in a variety of community papers points to a trend that had to have been considered: people don’t want towers in their backyards.

My local community paper spoke of local councillors looking into developing a comprehensive plan to deal with cell phone towers. The Toronto Star writes about residents of a Toronto neighbourhood challenging an agreement between a church and a carrier to build a “non-eyesore” 35-metre-tall communications tower – it will look like a flag pole, only taller.

We all want 5 bars of signal. We want capacity to be there when we want to make a call, send a message, pick up email. We want carriers investing in infrastructure. Just not in our backyard.

Carriers that have existing towers recognize the difficulty in building new sites and may be less willing to share their existing space because of concerns that they may need the capacity for their own requirements.

We want towers within sight of our cell phones; just not within sight of our eyes.

Industry Canada has launched a new consultation in order to work out the amendments to licenses for existing spectrum holders. We will want to see if imposing the tower sharing requirements – a new condition on current licenses – will be able to pass a challenge. How is it not a form of expropriation?