Following up on last week’s introduction of legislation to put oversight of abuse of dominant position in the hands of the Competition Bureau, the Minister of Industry has proposed to overturn the CRTC’s local forbearance decision, recognizing some of the missteps that were identified when the decision was first released in April.

Today’s announcement by the Minister is at least the 4th directive to the CRTC in the past 6 months. VoIP was dealt with twice, in the context of a reconsideration order and a ruling overturning the reconsideration. On its own, the CRTC almost immediately recognized the flaws in its Local Forbearance decision and began its own reconsideration of certain details, some of which are dealt with in the Minister’s announcement.

The Minister is introducing a simple presence test, rather than a market share loss threshold. In the case of business services, there needs to be at least one other facilities based wireline service provider. For residential service, there needs to be at least one more wireline provider, besides the ILEC, plus one other competitor, which could be a cellular service provider. All three must be independent of each other.

Interestingly, most people in Western Canada are able to choose between 4 facilities based players – TELUS, Shaw, Rogers wireless and Bell Mobility. In the east, Rogers cable and Rogers wireless only count once. In any case, the simple presence test will be met in most population centres in Canada.

The CRTC had been holding informal discussions in respect of its requirement for the ILECs to conform to 14 QoS metrics; today’s announcement reduces the requirement to adherence to only 9 of these, including some of the more difficult QoS metrics, such as due dates met for Competitor Digital Network services. TELUS and Bell had recently tried to negotiate relief from that specific indictor.

Consumers will immediately see more vigourous competition with a relaxation of the winback rules and further relaxation of rules for promotions. The proposed order explicitly permits the waiving of service charges for residential local winbacks, among other promotions. Previously, consumers that may have wanted to try out a cable company’s voice service may have been deterred by the risk of having to pay a telco service charge to come back.

More vigourous price competition and moves to include wireless into the local services mix make consumers the biggest winners. We’ll have more observations and comments tomorrow.

There has been a marked slow-down in the number of decisions coming out of the CRTC in the past week or so.

Not sure if it is the pre-Christmas slowdown or a reflection of preparing for the end of term for CRTC Chair, Charles Dalfen. A new chair may be announced this week.

There are a number of proceedings that are in the hands of the CRTC to resolve, including consumer issues such as telemarketing rules and industry structure rules in resolving the local forbearance reconsideration.

Which major decision would you expect to be the last one to bear the stamp of the current Commission?

We’re hearing word that the week ahead will bring some more telecom industry announcements from the office of Industry Minister Bernier – perhaps taking steps to implement more of the TPR report.

I received a comment on one of my blog postings that suggested that I was guilty of uttering disparaging remarks because I referred to the Canadian public as donut-eaters. Apparently, this struck a nerve with my reader, unless they were making a feeble attempt at humour.

Is it hate-speech to call Canadians ‘donut-eaters’?

I don’t think so, especially if you benchmark the comment against the 11 Hallmarks of Hate from the Human Rights Tribunal. Regular readers will recognize that I have referred to Tim Hortons (TSX: THI.TO) a number of times on this blog, dating back to the day of Tim’s IPO.

I won’t apologize. I think there is a constituency that would join me in wearing ‘donut-eater’ as a badge of honour.

Make mine an apple fritter, please and milk, no sugar, in my coffee.