Telecom Trends

The Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP) filed an application to the CRTC asking for Bell Canada to be ordered to provide their customers with preferential service at wholesale rates.

Why do I say that? Well, the application acknowledges that Bell had already begun to apply network management controls on its own customers. Why then would CAIP say that Bell is being discriminatory when it seeks to treat all traffic the same way?

The CAIP application covers a lot of ground. It is somewhat surprising that CAIP has asked for Bell to reply in just four days when so much material needs to be covered.

We will soon see what timetable the CRTC sets for the response.

As part of the regulatory training you have come to expect on these pages, let me provide a primer on how to file and answer a general complaint.

The CRTC's telecom rules of procedure, has a number of Parts. Part I is General; II is for tariff filings; III is for general rate applications (anyone remember those days?); etc. Part VII covers everything else that isn't covered under the other parts.

CAIP filed its complaint under Part VII. Normally, a company has 30 days to answer a Part VII application. CAIP has asked for an answer in 4 days and has asked for interim relief - for Bell to immediately cease its network management of wholesale traffic.

There is a three-part test (established by a couple Supreme Court legal precedents) in order to grant interim relief:

1. there is a serious issue to be determined;
2. the applicant would suffer irreparable harm if relief is not granted; and,
3. the balance of convenience, taking into account the public interest, favours granting the relief.
   

I'd suggest that all of us can accept the first part. It is not so obvious that either of the other parts hold water under serious scrutiny. Lifting network management controls will result in a degradation of service quality for all ISP customers. CAIP's application fails to consider an alternative scenario for managing a finite resource.

The CRTC has set service standards for dealing with applications. This one appears to fit as a Type 2 Part VII application, one that raises significant policy issues. It would therefore call for a fairly lengthy decision period by the CRTC and as such, one must again question why it is appropriate to have an abbreviated process. CAIP itself sent a legislative alert by email earlier today that points to the importance of this issue:

The "throttling" reduces speeds by as much as 90 percent - and marks an important milestone since the outcome will provide a clear answer on whether Canadian law currently protects net neutrality or if legislative reform is needed.

While we might like shared networks to be non-blocking with infinite capacity, that simply isn't possible. The traffic being managed represents a significant and growing share of network capacity, as attendees at The Canadian Telecom Summit heard last year in a presentation from Sandvine.

What kinds of technical constraints are reasonable in managing shared resources? Should operators take steps to protect the integrity of streaming video and music, voice and gaming, even if it means delays applications that are less sensitive to latency?

We'll be looking at all aspects of net neutrality at a special session at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit on June 18.

---

Update [May 14, 12:10 pm]
The CRTC issued its ruling on the interim relief issue, agreeing with the assessment in this blog posting - that there is a serious issue to be tried but that CAIP did not demonstrate irreparable harm. It did not assess the third branch of the criteria (balance of convenience) because the second test had failed.

Technorati Tags:
Bell, CRTC, CAIP, Canadian Telecom Summit