Canada Regulates VOIP
As expected, Canada's telecom regulator has decided to regulate VOIP. It means ILECs such as Bell Canada and Telus Corp. will have to seek pricing approval from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commision to ensure they don't sell Internet telephony service below cost, while cablecos and third-party suppliers such as Vonage and Primus are free to price any way they want. Bell Canada, Sasktel and Telus have already said they will appeal the decision to the federal cabinet, and could pursue legal action. The bottom line is the CRTC decided telephony service is telephony service regardless of the technology used to provide it. The CRTC's decision to regulate is not a surprise because it made it clear in a recent ruling there still isn't enough competition in Canada's $10 billion local phone market. (The CRTC does not consider the 10 million wireless users as an alternative to local service). In regulating VOIP, the CRTC is bending over backwards to pursue its pro-competition mandate. If this means hobbling ILECs with regulatory requirements for awhile so be it. When I've had some time to digest today's ruling, I'll provide some more insight.
May 12th, 2005 at 9:11 pm
Remember that all that ILECs have to do is to price their services above costs.
However, the CRTC did not create any linkage between plain old telephone service tariffs and the new VoIP tariffs that Bell has to file.
Bell can thus argue that their costs are $8 per month and ask for a mark-up of 15.0001% and the CRTC will be forced to say that this passes the imputation test.
The danger for Bell is that everything that is a tariff must be made available for resale.
Depends how much the ILECs want to go after the cableco's to defend their turfs.
It will be interesting to see the evolution of the necessary alliances between the ILECs and all of their resellers as a collective blow aginst the cable carriers.
-=Francois=-
May 13th, 2005 at 9:22 am
Cableco's also have resellers, and are mandated to provide certain parts of their networks and services for resale… Things are brewing in that respect. But I believe that the ILECs and Cableco's will try their best to keep VOIP in- house as long as possible
July 15th, 2005 at 12:41 am
congrats mate! Fine job and fine site!