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September 21, 2004
From Gatineau With Love
This morning the pulver.com “Save VoIP in Canada” team is in Gatineau, Quebec to attend and be part of the CRTC’s historic VoIP Hearings. We have been preparing for this event during the past few months and spent a part of the summer responding to the numerous amount of interrogatories as part of this process. We are scheduled to be number twenty of thirty-three scheduled presenters but the chance remains that we may end up presenting today, just in case some people traded places in their scheduled appearance.
Unlike my prior testimony at the FCC and at the US Senate where remarks were limited to be 5-7 minutes, each presenter at the CRTC hearing will be given a full 20 minutes to talk and then will be engaged by members of the CRTC in a question and answer period. For us, this has translated into 19 pages of written testimony.
What I find interesting and worrisome is that to date the telecom reporters covering the state of VoIP in Canada by in large did not have any issue with the CRTC’s initial finding with regard to the treatment of VoIP in Canada. Here in Canada the mindset seems to be that it is ok to treat an incumbent service provider one way when offering voice over broadband services in their local service area and another way when offering services in their competitor’s territories.
If it is true that there are only around 15,000 people in Canada today paying for voice over broadband services, then the 15,000 Canadian members of Free World Dialup represent something of a significant amount of users on a relative basis. What I don’t see is how or why a user population of 15,000 should be getting so much attention at a time when the real threat to the future of the public switched telephone network in Canada and around the world is the success of wireless and accelerating trends observed during the past four years known as “Landline Replacement.” In the past four years in the States 28 million access lines were turned off, not to be replaced.
In the States, at a time when there are over 160 million cell phone numbers in use, Cellular is still not regulated as a “replacement” to traditional wireline services. And in the States there are over 8 million homes which have converted to being only powered by Cellular. So why should the people providing the 600,000 or so people who subscribe for voice over broadband services in the States be worried about being regulated like a telco? In the Canadian subset of the global IP Communications marketplace, now is not the time to regulate but rather the time to put positive policies in place to ensure the growth of IP Communications and put in place a policy that encourages growth and investment by those companies best positioned to make such investments.
Posted by jeff on September 21, 2004 06:54 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Hi Jeff - welcome back to Canada!
The key question I had (and wondered if this is an option available to the CRTC) is:
Can the CRTC first opt for the "information service" minimal regulation FCC-like regime (applying it uniformly across the board for ILECs, CLECs, MSOs and other players) and then only intervene if it sees that the ILECs are engaging in anti-competitive behavior?
Do they have enough latitude to do this? If so, wouldn't that be the perfect "Canadian" solution?
Posted by: Ronald Gruia at September 21, 2004 09:14 PM