The CRTC issued a Decision on Friday in a relatively small proceeding that is noteworthy only because the process was 4 and a half years old. That’s right.

Rogers filed its original complaint in November 2001. Arguments went back and forth through January 2002. It took the Commission 9 months before it got around to realizing that it needed more information from the ILECs, so it addressed interrogatories to them in October 2002 and responses were received within a month.

Then the file disappeared.

Rogers had complained that the rates it paid for wireless interconnection in the territories of small ILECs was too high. Rogers had been prepared for delays, so it asked for the CRTC to make any rate reductions retroactive to January 2002. The CRTC denied this portion of the Rogers request, stating:

In effect, the CRTC is saying that local rates have been subsidized by Rogers overpayments for the past 3 years. Perhaps Rogers should have pressed the CRTC from the outset to make the rates interim, from the time of the original complaint.

Still, it is unclear to me why Rogers’ shareholders and subscribers have had to pay excess amounts to the small ILECs because this file went into hiding for more than 3 years.

Very few sentences get me going more than the words ‘Please hold the line, your call is important to us.’

Sure.

Let’s face it. If my call really was important to them, the company would hire more people to answer my call and not have to route me through an IVR.

Instead, many companies are implementing human-like interactive voice systems that seem better suited to frustrate the hell out of their customers, rather than speed their call to the right person.

Enter Get Human: www.gethuman.com is a site with an inventory of bypass codes to get around the IVR jail that traps so many of us. Will it do any good? Not likely, but it probably helped the website’s founder, Paul English, avoid some anger management therapy sessions.

Telecom industry: take note. There is frustration building out there.

And we’re on this topic, tell me why I have to enter my phone number and my language selection more than once?

Michael Urlocker had an interesting comment on my holiday weekend posting. He suggests that Skype is the competition for phone service and then asks if Skype is disruptive or destructive.

It is instructive to go back 25 years, when the post office was seen as competition by the telecom industry. After all, people made phone calls for Mother’s Day as a substitute for sending cards. The new telecopier capability, now called fax, was seen as the ultimate substitute for mail.

Telecom services are facing other behavioural shifts as a new generation communicates with a range of tools that simply didn’t exist before.

Sharing music or other files, instant messaging (with or without voice), mobility: These are all parts of the multi-disciplinary analysis to sort out the sources of competition over the next few years.

Victor Dwyer, writing in this weekend’s Globe and Mail, asked why he is paying for Touch tone service.

Would you still need to pay for obvious features like this in a truly competitive world of local telecom? Call your local cable company and ask them if they charge for tone dialing. Try to get service without it.

Ask Bell why they still charge. Their initial answer will be that they have to – it is in their tariffs, and they will likely add that the CRTC won’t let them waive the fee. Technically, that is correct, but don’t forget to ask if Bell has asked the CRTC for permission to reduce the price of local service to eliminate the charge. That would be the CRTC’s response: Bell is free to apply for a rate reduction. But what company could reasonably be expected to offer such a discount to every customer.

That is not how competition works.

A fully competitive market means that the price reduction would not have to be applied across the board. Some people would get better discounts than others.

Not fair, you say? Gee, I know of lots of people who paid less for their car than me; less for their clothes, their computer, their flowers and lots of other stuff. Of course, I paid less for a few things – I think.

Don’t get me started talking about prices for hotel rooms.

But these are all fully competitive markets.

So, keep asking why you still have to pay for touchtone. It’s a good example of the benefits that can arise from opening up the Local Services market.

We’re heading to a Muskoka auction today, since the weather has made for less than ideal boating, golfing, or anything else cottage-like.

I can’t help but think of the use of auctions as the perfect tool to match the value of a good to the willingness of a buyer to pay. A little discipline is needed to help prevent the excitement driving you to spend $5 too much on a butter churn.

An auction is the system that Barrett is seeking for determining the recipient of an underserved territory subsidy. It is the system that the Telecom Policy Review panel recommended. Barrett has launched a Cabinet appeal of the deferral account decision which awarded the subsidy to the incumbent telephone companies.