On Tuesday, November 15th, 2011, the CRTC rendered its revised decision on Usage-Based Billing and other areas of interest in Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2011-703 and 2011-704. The decision has been widely viewed as a compromise and yet after a few days of digestion, it appears we have a case of good news and bad news.The good news is that ACI is not affected, from a usage-based perspective, by the decision since all usage-based circuits are residential and ACI's customer base is almost 100% commercial. The CRTC rejected Bell's usage-based models and adopted MTS' capacity-based model which will allow Independent Internet Service Providers (IISPs) to manage their networks by purchasing blocks of capacity from the Incumbents in order to service their customer demands. This model reflects favourably in comparison to the volume (or usage) based model the CRTC originally ruled in favour of back in January 2011.
The bad news are the published flat-rate business rates - which are generating quite an unfavourable reaction here at ACI. As Michael Garbe expressed, at the Canadian ISP Summit on November 16th in Toronto: "a key component of our costs just went up 70 per cent. How are we going to pay for it? We can charge our customers more, we can cut our staff, we can avoid hiring. All these things are not the outcomes we were looking for.”
As for Kerrye Gordon, Director of Business Development, "I'm not happy with the rate increases announced by the CRTC as it could potentially impede our ability to compete against the larger providers. Based on price alone, this decision will clearly impact the options the consumer now has when sourcing internet services and solutions."
ACI expects the voice to grow louder on the impact of these decisions as time allows the entire IISP community the opportunity to digest it completely.
CRTC approves interim rates for higher speed connections.
