By Ahmad Hathout
MONTREAL – Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau said Thursday it is “essential” that the company’s Videotron subsidiary gets access to last mile fibre under the current wholesale access regime to be the country’s fourth national telecom.
The CRTC said in March that it has made it a priority to make a decision on mandating third parties to access the incumbent’s fibre facilities to homes under the current aggregated wholesale regime. The current regime mandates that wholesalers can bundle from the incumbents the transport and last mile coaxial facilities, but not last mile fibre.
“It is essential that incumbent carriers be required to offer [third party internet access] services through aggregated [fibre-to-the-premises] facilities for us to become a truly fourth national player in wireless and wireleine services for the rest of Canada,” Peladeau said during the company’s first quarter earnings conference call, just over a month after the company closed its purchase of Freedom Mobile.
But Peladeau complained that it would be difficult to compete with the incumbents in Ontario, for example, when they are pricing their residential gigabit services well below what they charge third parties for last mile fibre, citing Bell charging $122 for that access.
“The CRTC must implement a reasonable test for FTTP rates to prevent abusive situations where underlying providers offer their services at prices significantly below approved wholesale rates,” he added.
Peladeau said he is optimistic that the leadership at the CRTC and “more so” Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne understand the competitive issues at play and will address them appropriately.
“What the [CRTC] leadership said is that they know about all those tactics being used by the incumbents; they know that the roaming prices in Canada don’t make sense and therefore they will review this quickly…they also moved forward with a schedule to make the incumbents network opening for MVNO operators.”
The latter decision came Tuesday, when the CRTC ordered changes to the tariff pages of Rogers, Bell, Telus and SaskTel and ordered them to finalize agreements with mobile virtual network operators by August 7.
“As you can imagine, we intend to start as an MVNO operator where our network is not actually built. We have obligation that we will build this network, but…we have 7 years to do so,” Peladeau said.
Peladeau said Videotron is prepared to compete with the incumbents nationally, after an analyst on the call questioned how the company would fair when Rogers and Bell recently dropped prices on their wireline and wireless bundles.
Earlier this month, Rogers reduced its bundled rates by 35 per cent and dropped the cost of its 5G data by 50 per cent by doubling the monthly allotment. Bell CEO Mirko Bibic said this change in pricing is effectively a cosmetic change because Canadians pay these prices during certain periods of the year anyway.
For the period ending March 31, the company reported revenues of $1.1 billion, up 2.5 per cent compared to the same period last year, attributed to revenue increases in telecommunications and sports and entertainment. Meanwhile, net income was down to $113.5 million compared to $117.1 million over the same period, which was attributed in part to restructuring of operations and income tax expense.
Telecommunications revenues were up 2.4 per cent to $925 million, more than the $903.4 million Videotron made in the same period last year. Media revenue was down to $170.8 million from $181.8 million last year.
The company ended the period with approximately 1.74 million mobile wireless subscribers, up from 1.63 the year period; roughly 1.7 million internet subscribers, up from 1.6 million last year; 1.39 million television subscribers, down from 1.4 over the same period; and 730,000 landlines, down from 803,000 last year.
