MONTRÉAL – Cogeco has wanted to move into wireless for several years now, and while progress has been made towards that goal, it has been a marathon, not a sprint.
This was clear last Friday during an annual press briefing prior to the company’s annual general meeting, when Cogeco president and CEO Philippe Jetté highlighted the continued development of the company’s mobile wireless plans as one of its achievements of the year. (While Jetté gave his speech in French, Cogeco provided an English translation.)
Jetté listed Cogeco’s acquisition of 38 new spectrum licences last July and the CRTC’s decision last April to mandate a wholesale facilities-based mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) access service as significant milestones reached.
The company, nevertheless, is still waiting to get into wireless with no start date in clear sight.
As we reported last September, Cogeco vice-president of wireless solutions and innovation Marie Ginette Lepage said the company is waiting for reasonable terms and conditions and reasonable rates for MVNO access. This remains the case.
The CRTC’s MVNO decision indicates the terms and conditions of the service are to be set out in tariff pages that need Commission approval and the rates are to be commercially negotiated.
The MNOs, Bell, Telus, Rogers and SaskTel filed their tariff pages for approval last July. Since then, interventions have been submitted as have replies to those interventions. The CRTC, however, is still gathering information before it makes its decision.
The CRTC’s decision on the tariffs is important for Cogeco, which has made it clear it believes the tariffs filed go against the intention of the Commission’s MVNO decision.
Jetté emphasized this during his speech at last year’s Canadian Telecom Summit.
“Cogeco filed extensive comments before the Commission indicating that, in their current form, the incumbents’ proposed terms and conditions would impose unreasonable constraints on new entrants and existing regional carriers, and would undermine the policy objectives behind the framework,” he said.
A significant issue for Cogeco is the eligibility requirements outlined in the tariffs.
Bell, Rogers and Telus have opted “to load on extra criteria to further narrow the number of prospective MVNO customers,” Cogeco said in its submission to the CRTC.
These “extra criteria” essentially limit which companies are eligible to those already operating mobile wireless services, which Cogeco does not.
In response to Cogeco’s intervention, Telus said the CRTC “considered and rejected a broad-based MVNO mandate for several reasons, including that it would have a high negative impact on the sustainability of regional wireless carriers.”
Telus argued the whole point of the facilities-based MVNO model is to limit the number of companies qualifying for MVNO service to those that will expand existing networks and said the language of its tariff supports that objective.
Bell argued in its own reply Cogeco seemed “to be deliberately conflating the questions of who is eligible for the service and where they are eligible to use it, in order to claim that the only requirement to access the service is that an entity own wireless spectrum.”
The company argued this is “an impermissible attempt to use this tariff process to try to overturn central aspects of the Commission’s decision,” and said the CRTC “found as fact that failure to extend wholesale MVNO access to companies (like Cogeco) that are not existing wireless carriers in Canada was not imposing an undue or unreasonable disadvantage on those companies.”
Like Telus, Bell argued “Cogeco’s proposed approach is not consistent with the Commission’s policy objectives for the Facilities-Based MVNO Tariffs, which are narrowly targeted at expanding the networks of otherwise existing facilities-based carriers.”
Rogers in its reply made similar arguments, noting the CRTC made it “abundantly clear that the intention of the decision was to further facilities-based competition for the regional wireless carriers.”
Cogeco’s intervention also argued requirements for MVNOs to provide “precise traffic forecasts, and pay financial penalties for failure to meet such forecasts (in a highly competitive new market), are overly punitive and unjustified.”
Videotron, which has been wanting to expand out west, has also taken issue with the tariffs filed. Like Cogeco, Videotron argued in its intervention to the CRTC the forecasting penalties are punitive and “will sabotage the Commission’s policy objectives.”
Both Bell and Telus argued in their separate replies, however, that the forecasts are needed to manage network resources.
Cogeco and Videotron both raised several more issues in their respective interventions, including with regards to technical restrictions that Cogeco called “unnecessary”, as did other companies including Xplornet, Iristel and Sogetel.
The CRTC sent out requests for further information in December, responses to which are expected by Jan. 27.
