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At least in Canada, you can't afford the lawyers that have regulatory experience and are good enough to win. They're already employed by the large ILECs. Or t
by bcrl 4y ago
At least in Canada, you can't afford the lawyers that have regulatory experience and are good enough to win. They're already employed by the large ILECs. Or they don't know how to strategize and win at the 5d chess games the incumbents are playing to win for the long term. TekSavvy and CNOC played right into the goals of Bell with disaggregated. They tried to address their number one cost of capacity charges on last mile aggregated DSL networks (which were north of $10 per megabit) and asked for disaggregated to eliminate that cost. Bell saw that as a oppourtunity to load a whole bunch of costs into provisioning of disaggregated and ended up with several orders of magnitude higher costs for wholesale ISPs. Aggregated setup costs were about $10-15k for all of Ontario and Quebec. Disaggregated costs $50-150k per CO and would cost hundreds of millions to setup across all of Ontario and Quebec. Since FTTH is tied to disaggregated, Teksavvy has basically lost a large chunk of its market by backing the wrong horse.
There are maybe a few dozen people across Canada that truly understand what's going on in the Canadian telecom regulatory world. More people need to educate themselves about what's going on and ask the CRTC to improve the major pain points holding back independent providers.
- ShroudedNight 4y agoTo your last paragraph, how does one adequately educate oneself to advocate effectively at the CRTC if the ranks of those truly in the know are so small and inaccessible (seemingly by design)?
- bcrl 4y agoIt's not by design so much as a result of limited participation by the general public. Proceedings are posted to the CRTC's website and are available for anyone to view and comment on. When it comes to information that the CRTC considers in its decisions, as the CRTC functions quite similarly to a court: they will not consider evidence that is not presented to its version of the public record. Unless the general public submits their comments to proceedings, the comments tend to be limited to the views of carriers and a few public interest advocacy bodies. Stories published in the media, on blogs or elsewhere will not be considered unless someone submits them to the CRTC's record, even though they may be readily access to the CRTC. This becomes quite important when there is locally relevant information that the commission is not aware of, or if there are business practices that the commission should be made aware of. People need to complain when their choice of internet providers is limited or if incumbents increase prices twice a year. If nobody raises these issues at the CRTC, nothing will change.