By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – Just over three months since the CRTC put in place guidance for its mandated mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) regime, the new chair wants providers to let the commission know about the status of negotiations.
“I would like to know where those negotiations are,” Vicky Eatrides, who took on the job just over two weeks ago, told Cartt as part of her rotation of media interviews on Friday. “We are going to follow up soon to figure out where those negotiations are between the larger players and the regional providers.”
The CRTC, under previous chair Ian Scott, put in place the long-awaited terms and conditions for the regime, which forces the larger providers to negotiate access to their wireless networks by regional carriers who have infrastructure and spectrum.
Cogeco, which said it would wait for those terms before taking a definitive position on mobile market entry, told investors this month that there are now 30-40 people working on its wireless plan. Where and when it will launch is still a mystery.
Those are the kinds of questions Eatrides said she’d like to get up to speed on — otherwise, she said, it is a “wait and see” approach.
As consolidation sweeps the industry with independent telecommunications companies being bought by larger ones — and the looming Rogers takeover of Shaw — she reiterated what Scott told Cartt earlier this month that there is a need to figure out wholesale wireline internet access prices.
“We really need to have a hard look at what’s happening,” she said. “What we’ve done on the internet side is clearly not having the desired effect that we wanted, and so we’re looking at coming up with a better model with respect to…wholesale access.”
In 2021, the regulator dropped its proposal to lower the rate at which smaller providers buy internet capacity from the incumbents, arguing that the lower 2019 rates had errors in the methodology. That decision meant the industry would have to continue to work with the higher, previously interim 2016 rates.
“There’s a lot in terms of what we can do, and obviously those are two areas of focus,” Eatrides added.
But she also noted that there is a balance that the regulator needs to take. “While I really want to see lower prices – everybody does, for mobile services, for internet – we also want to see investment, we want to see innovation, we want to see a resilient network.”
Eatrides noted that the CRTC could be saddled with additional responsibilities, such as its possible empowerment to force big technology platforms to contribute to Canadian content and monetarily compensate news publications for hosting their content, if the Online Streaming Bill and the Online News Act are passed into law.
“I do think that we need to be able to prioritize, because I keep saying we can move mountains, but not all at once,” she said, noting the regulator puts out hundreds of decisions and notices a year. “Let’s figure out what those top priorities are and resource them so that we can move in a timely manner.”
A lawyer by training with a competition background, Eatrides has been lauded as a person with the experience to tackle the seemingly unenviable challenges of regulating industries that have proven to be emotional issues for Canadians.
She spent over a dozen years at the Competition Bureau, where she said she did collaborative work with the CRTC when it came to examining mergers and acquisitions. She said she learned to familiarize herself with the regulator and said she felt like it would be a good fit.
Eatrides said she had a “couple of conversations” with Scott to get her up to speed on the organization and “what the pressing issues are.” She said she’s spent a lot of her first two weeks in briefings almost every day to get the issues down.
She said when she’s done that, she plans to meet starting in early February with stakeholders across Canada.
She said she ultimately hopes to “lead a very open and accessible and transparent” commission.
“I want Canadians to be able to say, ‘I know what the CRTC does for me and they have my best interests in mind.”
