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Quality of Service Credits
By Mark Evans | March 24, 2005
This is difficult to believe but the CRTC - Canada's telecom regulator - has unveiled a new regime that will give consumers credits on their bills if their telephone carrier provides sub-standard service. The QoS system, which will be retro-active to 2002, is based on 13 criteria, including whether repair appointments were met and whether out-of-service trouble reports were cleared within 24 hours. The CRTC said from 1998 to 200, ILECs provided sub-standard service, and it is not “convinced pressure was sufficient to ensure telephone companies would meet the approved Q of S standards.”
You can bet Bell, Telus, Aliant, etc. are going to be royally pissed. It's hard enough being an ILEC these days - what with the emergence of VOIP and competitors piggybacking on high-speed networks - without having to worry about regulators dinging yor for late repairmen, business offices that close five minutes early and complaints that take longer than a day to address. This is just another example of the CRTC taking too much of a hands-on approach to cater to the whims of consumers. Without a doubt, it's an anti-carrier, anti-business decision that makes you question the regulator's role/relevance in a fast-changing industry.
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March 24th, 2005 at 2:54 pm
“Anti-business,” “anti-carrier,” “catering to the whims of consumers.” You sound like a VP of regulatory for Bell, or worse, Terence Corcoran. Since when did you become anti-consumer? Since when did the CRTC's role be defined as an enabler of business? The commission is also a consumer watchdog, and it's about time they took this measure. In fact, it's one of the few consumer-interest measures it has taken over the past couple of years. Note that the commission said it would make exception for strikes situation, such as the one that struck Telus. It's also a sliding scale, so the 5 per cent (of revenue divided by number of customers) possible credit is a maximum that will likely never be dolled out. Also consider there is $1 billion in a contribution fund that, technically, should be redistributed back to consumers but the carriers want to spent it — the CRTC will probably let them.
Lacking any kind of power to issue penalties (though this is under review), the CRTC's only option is to come up with this kind of scheme to make sure the carriers don't jerk customers around.
Tyler
March 24th, 2005 at 9:16 pm
I assume Mark is being sarcastic? What's wrong with catering to consumers?