Through the summer, we wrote about Bell’s application to raise Centrex rates and the subsequent opposition filed by the Federal government.

On Friday, the CRTC gave final approval to the Bell price increase, rejecting arguments to allow customers out of their contracts in the case that the telephone company initiates the tariff increase.

The Commission said

if the Commission were to direct the Companies, as has been essentially suggested by MTS Allstream, to modify the terms of their Centrex tariffs, and by extension other tariffs, so as to provide customers with the ability to reduce or eliminate their use of a service during the term of a contract period without incurring any penalties, the Commission considers that incentives for the ILECs to continue to make available discounted pricing plans for their customers would be greatly reduced.

This seems disingenuous. According to the CRTC, customers can’t be let out of their contracts when the phone companies raise their prices, because of a fear that ILECs may no longer offer discounts for long term contracts if customers aren’t bound to stick it out. What about the idea that a contract is binding on both parties? What good are discounts if the ILECs get to raise the prices of their own will in the middle of the term?

The ILECs created their own disincentive for customers to sign up to long term contracts, since there is apparently no assurance that the pricing will be maintained. What Allstream sought was for the Commission to permit customers to hold ILECs accountable to offer the committed prices for the duration of the contract period. You would think this wasn’t a novel concept.

Who won in the end? We’ll see if the rate increase was worth the loss of goodwill when these contracts are up for renewal.

A week ago, I asked “Why not in Canada?” in looking at T-Mobile’s newest combination WiFi / cellular handset.

This afternoon, MTS announced an expansion of its WiFi capability and it seems to me that there is an opportunity for MTS to be a spoiler in the wireless industry. Granted, their WiFi network is only 5% the size of T-Mobile’s. But a combination device could be an interesting opportunity for MTS to lower its users’ data roaming out-payments to TELUS and Bell.

Why not?

About 16 years ago, I remember the Canadian president of a major computer firm giving me a tour of his company’s pavilion at the ITU world exposition in Geneva. The president proudly told me that 100% of his firm’s data network was riding on the network of the company I was working for. I told him that he should fire his head of communications.

I thought my boss was going to swallow his lit cigar.

My concern was network reliability. My boss was concerned about revenues.

That same year, at the CRTC’s Construction Program Review (CPR) meetings, I expressed concern about decommissioning switching centres to the point that too much traffic was running through buildings that would become catastrophic single points of failure. We were told not to worry; there were fault tolerant processors, dual cable entrances. As the CRTC used to find in its conclusion of the CPRs, there was no evidence to find the telco plans unreasonable – a double negative by design.

After Friday night’s network failure, ask the people in Newfoundland if they still share the same level of confidence in their telecom network. Ask them if too much of the province’s communications needs runs through a single building. As the investigation into Friday’s network failure proceeds, let’s see if there is still no evidence that the construction plans were unreasonable.

On August 2, Sault Ste. Marie was completely isolated by a fibre cut. In both cases, 9-1-1 emergency services were knocked out of service. Newfoundland’s emergency measures chief is calling for proof that this won’t happen again.

As we mentioned in August, the current CRTC reporting regime, designed to protect competitors, may not sufficiently look after the interests of individual consumers. We wrote:

We think that consumers would be well served if all Canadian service providers, wireline and wireless, were required to report service outages affecting a broad base of subscribers for more than 15 minutes.

We would include broadband internet access service providers in that reporting as well, given the migration of some voice services to ride over broadband. Reliable connectivity for consumers will become a competitive supplier issue as access independent services take hold.

In an environment of government organizations looking at emergency preparedness, we may need to have an independent audit of how carriers are engineering their networks in a competitive environment.

Do we have an easily accessible database of service affecting outages? Shouldn’t we?

In August, we asked if razor thin margins in a competitive marketplace may be a contributing factor. Will income trusts add further pressure?

Will the CRTC take charge of leading an examination of the security of network architectures, or will emergency measures organizations lead the way?