Smaller Internet Providers In Canada Just Got A Big Win In Court (itworldcanada.com) 27
Pig Hogger (Slashdot reader #10,379) writes:
In August 2019, Canadian telecom regulator CRTC ruled that ISPs must lower their wholesale rates (for other independant ISPs) retroactively to March 2016. Big telecoms (Bell, Rogers, Cogeco, Videotron, Shaw & Eastlink) appealed, which suspended the rate decrease immediately.
Now, a year later, the Canadian Federal Court of Appeals ruled that the CRTC decision stands, and that they must also pay the legal fees paid by the independent ISPs. For now, the big ISPs have 30 days to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The Huffington Post reports: "This is a massive win for Canadians," said Matt Stein, chair of the Canadian Network Operators Consortium (CNOC) and CEO of Distributel, one of about 30 CNOC members. He said that the court's decision ends a "pivotal chapter" in a fight that challenged "Canada's longstanding practice of appropriate oversight to ensure fair pricing and competition."
The court's 3-0 ruling concluded by saying the award of costs to TekSavvy and CNOC reflects the fact that the appellants were not successful in convincing the three judges on any of the issues they raised.
IT World reports: The respondents, consisting of the independent ISPs, said the appeal should be dismissed as it had nothing to do with law or jurisdiction and simply advanced a tax argument. "It seemed very clear right off the bat that they were not raising legal or jurisdictional grounds," said Andy Kaplan-Myrth, vice-president of regulatory affairs at TekSavvy. "All of their grounds for appeal were really factual matters or policy matters, and they were dressed up as legal or jurisdictional issues that they could argue to the Court...."
Although the stay has been lifted, the new wholesale rates are not yet instated. However, independent ISPs have renewed confidence that the new rates will come into effect soon.
Now, a year later, the Canadian Federal Court of Appeals ruled that the CRTC decision stands, and that they must also pay the legal fees paid by the independent ISPs. For now, the big ISPs have 30 days to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The Huffington Post reports: "This is a massive win for Canadians," said Matt Stein, chair of the Canadian Network Operators Consortium (CNOC) and CEO of Distributel, one of about 30 CNOC members. He said that the court's decision ends a "pivotal chapter" in a fight that challenged "Canada's longstanding practice of appropriate oversight to ensure fair pricing and competition."
The court's 3-0 ruling concluded by saying the award of costs to TekSavvy and CNOC reflects the fact that the appellants were not successful in convincing the three judges on any of the issues they raised.
IT World reports: The respondents, consisting of the independent ISPs, said the appeal should be dismissed as it had nothing to do with law or jurisdiction and simply advanced a tax argument. "It seemed very clear right off the bat that they were not raising legal or jurisdictional grounds," said Andy Kaplan-Myrth, vice-president of regulatory affairs at TekSavvy. "All of their grounds for appeal were really factual matters or policy matters, and they were dressed up as legal or jurisdictional issues that they could argue to the Court...."
Although the stay has been lifted, the new wholesale rates are not yet instated. However, independent ISPs have renewed confidence that the new rates will come into effect soon.
Of course, they will appeal immediatly (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, they will appeal immediatly, because as soon as the appeal is entered, the rates lowering is suspended again, just like last time.
And even if this drags on for years, during this time they will have the rates they want, they hope that some of the little players that are suing will go tits up, and finally, the legal costs they face, even if ordered by the supreme court to once again pay the legal fees of independent ISPs, it will still be insignificant compared to what they stand to lose.
Re:Of course, they will appeal immediatly (Score:5, Informative)
as soon as the appeal is entered, the rates lowering is suspended again
A suspension is not automatic. A suspension will be granted only if the appellant can show that they are likely to prevail. After two consecutive smackdowns, they will have difficulty doing that.
Re:Of course, they will appeal immediatly (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, they will appeal immediatly, because as soon as the appeal is entered, the rates lowering is suspended again, just like last time.
And even if this drags on for years, during this time they will have the rates they want, they hope that some of the little players that are suing will go tits up, and finally, the legal costs they face, even if ordered by the supreme court to once again pay the legal fees of independent ISPs, it will still be insignificant compared to what they stand to lose.
The SCC is the end of the line. If (when) they lose there, that retroactive refund is going to come due. They can kick it down the line one more time, but the bill is still going to continue to grow regardless. Right now they only owe for 4 years. By then they may owe for 8. The SCC might order them to pay interest too (it is unclear if that is the case in this ruling).
Re:Of course, they will appeal immediatly (Score:5, Informative)
They will not appeal. The court case was a delay tactic to give them time to lobby the government, which they did successfully.
https://www.canada.ca/en/innov... [canada.ca]
Everything now rests in the hands of the CRTC, which has gone back to review the decision, but now with this order-in-council which they must include in their decision making process.
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Hah hah, you're just being silly. It's to prevent price gouging, like the railroads, and Standard Oil, and MaBell... were doing during their big monopoly period
Let's hope for a nice solid unanimous vote from the supreme court also. Power to the Little People!
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Awesome news! Iâ(TM)m so glad to hear the large telcos have to directly subsidize the small ones. My feelings feel so good when I read about communism!
Never mind that itâ(TM)s a big loss for a bunch of other providers who will just be passing the costs on to the primarily underprivileged minority urban consumers which in turn get to support small ISPs out in predominantly white upper class rural areas.
I guess thatâ(TM)s White Privilege(tm) at work for ya!
Unfortunately this is the only way to allow and encourage competition. It would be wonderful if anyone who wanted to could trench new fiber anywhere or string new cable on all the poles. Unfortunately that is not practical. The established players have an effective monopoly on public rights-of-way. Take that away completely and I would be more inclined to agree with you.
Re: A Big Win for Communism (Score:2)
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Hate to break it to you but there is a far better way to do just that. Split up last mile and services with a one (or more) strand per home. CWDM over that strand gets you plenty of channels. Convert the CO to the carrier neutral hand off. IPv6 even makes the routing easy as it deals with picking the closest address and thus path so a multiple IP networks can work side by side.
That means you could have a municipal network, TV, Phone, Internet, business, and whatever else all with dedicated bandwidth. A
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Hate to break it to you but there is a far better way to do just that. Split up last mile and services with a one (or more) strand per home. CWDM over that strand gets you plenty of channels. Convert the CO to the carrier neutral hand off. IPv6 even makes the routing easy as it deals with picking the closest address and thus path so a multiple IP networks can work side by side.
That means you could have a municipal network, TV, Phone, Internet, business, and whatever else all with dedicated bandwidth. All of this would work fine with fiber installed in the 70's (I've got 40ge links going over it today and could support higher if needed). Providers could stand up their own switch gear or lease aggregation and/or back hall from others.
In any event that gets us to a single last mile for all data applications.
Sure, it is always nice to blue sky ideas. Does not help with the vast majority of existing homes now being served only by legacy copper and carrier owned COs. Also, what you propose is well outside of the regulatory domain and would require legislation. And money. Lots and lots of money, because in the end only government would be able to build out that carrier agnostic last mile. Nobody else is going to build and maintain these things if they have to share. They don't want to share what they have no
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Companies are allready installing this type of infrastructure, Now in a perfect world muni's would deal with the last mile, taking over existing telco CO's is allready happening when we do not have legislation blocking it. As to cost as I said 50 year old fiber can support current and all expected future standards so having a muni bond the install costs to make that and the maintenance costs back in access fee's is not unreasonable to expect.
The major issue with other sharing models is cable has a congeste
Re:A Big Win for Communism (Score:5, Informative)
> Awesome news! Iâ(TM)m so glad to hear the large telcos have to directly subsidize the small ones. My feelings feel so good when I read about communism!
Then you'll definitely get a hard on from this:
Telus would not exist if it had not been started by the public. It has its roots in the Alberta government purchasing several small telephone operators in Alberta to kickstart the drive toward providing telephone service across the province.
BC Tel was a private corporation from the beginning, slowly growing through a series of mergers. It acquired a Federal Charter early on, granting it access to public lands, right of ways, and some predatory, monopolistic rights.
Bell is much the same, except it got national Charter rights. It set up a lot of deals with the CN as it expanded across the prairies; the CN is another public company. Bell benefited a lot by that arrangement.
Re:A Big Win for Communism (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A Big Win for Communism (Score:5, Funny)
Apart from the fact that you're simply trolling by throwing "communism" and "white privilege" in there, you don't seem to know how the free market works.
I know, the whole thing is confusing because there's the word "free" in there, and the major ISPs definately don't seem to be free in this case. But the reality is that in order to work, the free marked needs regulation.
Remember, businesses don't want competition. Only the consumers do. So in order to have competition, you need governement regulation because businesses will do everything in their power to eliminate it and become a monopoly.
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You don't understand how wholesale works I guess.
No one is asking the big telcos to sell access to the smaller ISPs at a loss. They just can't price the sale of their network at a price that makes it impossible for those smaller ISPs to compete with the larger ISPs as Internet providers.
It is interesting that currently Teksavvy is able to provide non-data capped services on the Bell network yet Bell doesn't offer this option at all. Part of the reason that Bell (and the other large telcos) are fighting this
Wholesale Rates Fibre (Score:4, Insightful)
As a former customer of TekSavvy, I was appreciative that Telus was mandated (by the CRTC) to provide wholesale access to their phone lines by smaller ISPs. I was able to get a MUCH better deal for ADSL service, plus static IP addresses, and no cap on how much data I was allowed to download each month.
However, my bandwidth needs exceed what ADSL can provide (on uploads in particular), and TekSavvy does not provide the fibre optic service I was looking for. I believe this is because the CRTC mandate only requires Telus to resell their copper lines, not their fibre. I'm hoping the regulations will be updated in the near future to also include wholesale access to fibre.
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CRTC mandated access to fibre some time ago. The problem has been the wholesale rates are so high it makes it financial suicide to offer higher speeds. The recent $10 increase across the board has allowed them to start offering 1Gbps/30Mbps speeds for $115... unfortunately it will cost them ~$3200 to provide it
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CRTC for some unknown reason only mandated access to fibre in eastern Canada, not the west. At this time Bell must resell their fibre to competitors, but Telus does not have to do the same. Now this is expected to change and become more equal in the future, but that's not the case at this time.
That said, the requirements are also different, for adsl they have to allow access to everything, including the dslam and upstream connections. For fibre only the actual fibre must be provided access to. It is up to t
Re:Wholesale Rates Fibre (Score:4, Informative)
It's mandated in the West as well. It's merely being implemented in Ontario and Quebec first due to higher demand. (see CRTC 2020-187)
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You may want to re-read that CRTC notice that you reference. It specifically states that it's not mandated in the west at this time, and requests comments on the idea of mandating it in the future., It also specifically states that comments from the incumbents show that it's unlikely to be done on the originally proposed schedule, or as completely as in the east.
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It does not specifically state that.
It says:
By letter dated 6 July 2018, the Commission requested that other wholesale HSA service providers, namely Bell MTS Inc. (Bell MTS); Bragg Communications Incorporated, carrying on business as Eastlink (Eastlink); Saskatchewan Telecommunications (SaskTel); Shaw Cablesystems G.P. (Shaw); and TELUS Communications Inc. (TCI) submit proposed configurations, along with supporting rationale, for their disaggregated wholesale HSA services in their respective serving territories. Bell Canada and RCCI were also asked to submit proposed configurations for the services in their respective serving territories outside Ontario and Quebec (hereafter, the follow-up proceeding).
So originally, in 2016, they only asked Ontario/Quebec based companies, but in 2018 they followed through with everyone else.
The Commission considers that, by establishing disaggregated wholesale HSA service configurations with the appropriate level of disaggregation for all wholesale HSA service providers in all regions across Canada, mandated access to fibre would begin for all wholesale HSA service providers, thereby making higher speeds accessible to competitors on both cable and telephone company networks.
Re: Wholesale Rates Fibre (Score:2)
Again, your own link disagrees with you. It specifically states that this is a proposal, not an existing policy, and is a request for comment on that proposal. It says the order "would" mandate it, not "has" mandated it. They also specify that due to pushback from the providers it hasn't happened and has been delayed, and even that it likely won't happen in its original form.
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Again, it does not state that.
First paragraph:
In an effort to facilitate the deployment of disaggregated wholesale high-speed access (HSA) services, the Commission is issuing this notice of consultation to address the appropriate network and service configurations for the disaggregated wholesale HSA service regime for all wholesale HSA service providers across the country, including the option of a modified level of disaggregation on the networks of Bell Canada, Cogeco, RCCI, and Videotron.
ie: the mandate has been given, now it's about figuring out how to deploy the disaggregated model. There is some disagreement about how to do it but it's already being implemented: https://imgbox.com/6knJvyoU [imgbox.com]
CRTC (Score:4, Funny)
A temporary victory, I bet (Score:2)
User Friendly? (Score:2)
More importantly, does this mean Columbia Internet is saved, and User Friendly will produce again?
hmm . . . :)
hawk