Bram Abramson, Commissioner for Ontario
Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)
Thank you for the introduction and the warm welcome, yet again. It’s great to be back with you again here in Gatineau, on unceded, unsurrendered Algonquin Anishnaabeg territory. I thank the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation for having me as a guest, and for stewarding these lands and waters since time immemorial.
And I thank CanWISP for having me back. This is three years in a row and, I think, the fourth time I’ve addressed you from this stage. Do I get an honourary membership or something at this point?
Entrepreneurship and interesting times
The organizers asked me for a title for this talk. So I thought about who CanWISP’s members are, and what you must be going through these days. And then I had a title: Connectivity Entrepreneurship in Interesting Times.
You are certainly connectivity entrepreneurs. As service providers, you represent a group that brings high-speed Internet access to those who need it in locations that lack it. You do it efficiently, in ways that fill gaps, adapting the right technology for the right purpose. You leverage spectrum efficiently. You operate on lean business models. You navigate evolving regulatory environments. You often serve the very communities you live in, answerable not just on the phone but in the grocery store or wherever else you might find yourself.
Last year, during the Q&A, someone asked me how you could hope to compete with a major foreign satellite player that has come to compete in our relatively open telecom marketplace, and that has invested enormous sums to cover much of Canada.
I think those of you in this room have something special to offer, even beyond a very different cost structure. That is that you are based locally. You have your ears to the ground, near the communities you serve. You have a customer-centric, community-driven approach.
I was at the recent annual conference of the Rural Ontario Municipalities Association, and saw that CanWISP showed up with a booth. You wanted to be there for municipalities who say, look, I understand that there are all these funding programs and all these telcos and ISPs, but I still don’t have broadband built into my community, and I still don’t know who to call to get it. You have created a membership category for municipalities to that end. You are serious about identifying and shaving down the roadblocks to getting your networks built. You are, truly, connectivity entrepreneurs.
At the same time, I don’t think anyone can say these aren’t interesting times. It already seems like ancient history to say that COVID-19 changed the game both for local broadband and for its role in community economic development. Now we’re into new ways of keeping things interesting. Whether it’s constant technological disruption; new competitors on the horizon; rising inflation and, with it, operational costs; uncertainty about the price structure for the equipment you procure on the international marketplace; the evolving political environment — I know it’s a lot.
But who better to navigate change effectively, adapt quickly, bring flexibility and innovation to the table, and make their case in the international markets for growth capital effectively and convincingly, than entrepreneurs?
At the CRTC
As for me, I am now two years and a month into my five-year CRTC mandate as Ontario Commissioner. You won’t be surprised to hear we continue to be busy too.
I think we have made progress on several fronts. We are engaged in the work of modernizing the Broadband Fund program that helps underwrite universal service in Canada by pushing core, durable telecom facilities out into the hardest-to-reach parts of our country. At the same time, we’ve taken steps to improve competition in telecom markets in a range of ways, from poles to buried cabling to wholesale access, to transport, which we’re still committed to looking at.
At the same time, our goals remain pretty similar.
We are working for Canadians to benefit from increased choice and affordable telecommunications services. We want further investment in high-quality networks. We recognize the critical role for telcos of all sizes in expanding connectivity efficiently to underserved communities.
We are working for all Canadians to be connected to high-speed and reliable services. No less so in rural, remote and Indigenous communities, which are traditionally underserved. The work of catalyzing investment and effort in those communities towards that goal is fundamental.
We are working for a vigorous, competitive, and fair marketplace for you and for the consumers who rely on you, so that competition and choice can bloom wherever smart entrepreneurs can find a way to make it work. In a fair marketplace, consumers know what they’re getting, know what’s available to them, and have the opportunity to switch to an available competitor if they prefer.
And we are working for a safer, more reliable communications system for Canadians. Telecom service providers are stewards for the connectivity that supports social inclusion; cultural, economic, and financial participation; education, healthcare, and employment opportunities; and the full spectrum of life in a digital society. Your customers look to you to steward that connectivity in ways that help ensure their safety. They look to you to keep that connectivity on, because when extreme conditions ensue, they need that connectivity more than ever. Reliability, and resiliency are more important than they ever have been.
Support structures and access
One of our key workstreams for broadband builders has been our work on regulatory measures to make access to telco poles more efficient. Last year I told you about some of our decisions in this area, including specific timelines, costs for corrective work, good-faith negotiations on upgrades, one-touch make-ready, pre-make-ready installs, and so on.
Much of our work takes place through “tariffs.” A tariff is really just a contract available to all eligible comers, and may specify rates, terms, and conditions. Well, earlier this year we arrived at final tariffs for communications poles that reflect our decisions. We look forward to hearing how things go.
In the meantime, we are working to make another decision about wireless attachments on those poles — in other words, on whether the rules requiring telecom pole owners to let third parties attach wireless equipment to those poles should be modified and, potentially, broadened. What types of facilities could be deployed on these poles to support wireless networks? What would that mean for spare capacity, construction standards, and interference? What can we do at the Commission to streamline processes?
Because this is a matter before us, I cannot even hint at any possible outcome. But I can say we plan to release a decision on this key issue soon. Any decision we make will promote sustainable competition while prioritizing network investment and the use of existing infrastructure.
At the same time, we have long been active working with all stakeholders, including municipalities, carriers, and citizens, to help facilitate access to other civil works and supports needed to build out modern networks. To assist in this process, we convened parties between 2011 and 2013 to develop a model Municipal Access Agreement. Since then, we have continued to adjudicate disputes around those agreements and related issues and continue to have open files in this workstream.
We likewise set down fair access rules for communications service provider competition in multi-dwelling units, or MDUs, more than 20 years ago, in 2003, further refining them in 2021. As a guiding principle, end-users have the right to access the network of their choice. Competitors have the right to install it. Adjudication between buildings and networks that cannot agree on terms continues to be yet another active workstream for us.
Now, what I have been talking about so far are ways to lower the expense of building networks by addressing and targeting some of the administrative and regulatory hurdles, and red tape, that make deployment projects take longer or proceed less efficiently. But there is always more work to do. What I have found is that applying root-cause analysis to detailed case studies is one of the best ways to identify that work.
Sometimes, that root-cause analysis leads to identifying areas where our help is needed. Sometimes it leads to other ideas. As a thought experiment, for instance, consider the example of “shadow fibre” – the unused duct space, sheath space, and unlit fibre built by entities like municipalities, utilities, railways, public institutions, and private businesses for internal use that do not market it for broader commercial purposes, whether to avoid regulatory risk or because they simply don’t have the capacity to. Shadow fibre, whether in the metropolitan or rural transport segments, is not typically under the jurisdiction of the Telecommunications Act. Nor is it accessible to broadband builders, even where it is badly needed. So I sometimes wonder what could be done, particularly in rural and remote areas, if we found ways to work creatively and collaboratively to identify these risks and collaborate on mutually acceptable solutions to unlock some of the latent capacity, and foregone revenue, that shadow fibre represents.
That’s just one idea I’ve heard from some of the folks in this industry and in this room. I know there are others. You’re familiar with the phrase “see something, say something.” What I want to leave with you on this topic is “see something that doesn’t make sense, say something to the regulator.” Closing connectivity gaps is already hard enough. We hope we can be your partners in making sure it is no harder than it has to be.
Broadband Fund
Of course, no matter how hard we work to drive down administrative costs, the cost of equipment and labour will always mean that the expansion of networks cannot always be completely achieved by market forces alone. As you know working in your communities, the last few households are often the hardest ones to reach.
The open data we publish tell us that 21.8 percent of households in rural areas do not have access to reliable terrestrial connectivity that hits our 50/10 target. That works out to more than 688,000 households dependent on expensive satellite services – where available – that, while fundamental to filling gaps, are also sensitive to weather, limited in the density they can deliver, and don’t create the long-term infrastructure and community economic development opportunities that permanent networks do.
In 2016, we decided to overhaul our program for ensuring basic telephone service to all Canadians and move towards a competitively neutral Broadband Fund. We established the criteria for that fund in 2018, and launched three calls for applications – the first two in 2019, and then the third in late 2022. Since I last spoke to you, we have continued to commit funding from the third call — to Inuit communities in northern Quebec, to nearly 100 kilometres of major roads in Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec and Ontario, and to roads and rural communities in the Yukon, B.C., and Manitoba.
We have also continued to improve how we administer the Broadband Fund itself. Late last year we announced a number of changes in three broad areas — making it faster for you to submit an application and for us to evaluate it; helping Indigenous applicants; and updating our approach to eligibility maps.
In terms of faster application and evaluation, we simplified some eligibility and assessment criteria, like the requirement to propose specific packages and rates, and collapsed the separate access and transport categories in order to simplify things. We have reduced the amount of information required at all stages of the funding process. We’ve consolidated separate reporting requirements.
In terms of reducing barriers for Indigenous applicants, we have made a number of changes, including on consultation, consent, outreach, and engagement, all en route to a stand-alone process we’re running to co-develop a distinct Indigenous stream to the Broadband Fund process, and with the help of the Indigenous Relations Team we’ve stood up within the CRTC.
Finally, in terms of making our mapping make more sense, we’ve dropped the hexagons for a call-by-call approach, expanded how we define major transportation roads, and provided a way to identify the roads that provide key linkages between communities.
Now, I know that some would have liked to see us go further. Not a few of you in this room have asked about my dissenting opinion. The Commission is a collegial body made up of nine members advised by staff. Our decisions are made, either by the full Commission of nine members, or by committees and panels appointed from among the nine. One of our strengths is the range of backgrounds and experiences from which we all hail and which we bring to bear on our decisions. We don’t always agree on everything. But the ability and flexibility to put dissenting views on the record is an important glimpse into some of the different ways that the submissions we receive and the record we build is read, received, and processed.
In other words, and I cannot stress this enough, engagement matters. When I appear before you, I have often talked about the importance that, across the country, telcos of all sizes meet regularly with their regional Commissioner, invite us to see your facilities, and help us understand your businesses, your challenges, and the playing field you’re meeting them on. The fuller the picture we have of the overall sector, the better we’re able to view that picture through the perspectives we bring to bear on our activities.
Fair marketplace
Next, consumer protection as part of a competitive marketplace. Last fall, we published our Consumer Protections Action Plan, which summarizes the measures we have in place and what we are working on to ensure clear contracts, minimize bill shock, and promote transparency both in choosing a service provider and in knowing what to expect from them.
Those consumer measures include elements like the Internet Code that sets out the consumer rules of the road for broadband; and the CCTS, the complaints arbitrator that administers the Internet Code and contract performance more broadly. We have rules around cancellations taking effect in a timely manner. A sophisticated set of technical interchange standards helps ensure not only that, when consumers want to change service providers, they can ask their new provider to cancel your old service on your behalf – but also that all the correct data flows in the right direction behind the scenes to make it happen. Speed-testing we conduct from time to time helps verify the quality of what is delivered in the marketplace.
Consumer rules and protections like these protect more than just consumers. They also help protect the competitive process for market participants like yourselves, because they ensure that consumers are able to make informed choices based on an accurate portrait of the prices and services they are buying over an extended period of time.
Of course, just like the other workstreams I mentioned, there is always more to do here, too. We are currently engaged in a series of four consultations around making it easier to choose, change, and cancel a plan.
The first one is about clear rules for notifying customers when their plans or discounts are about to end. The second looks at fees that some service providers may charge when a subscriber cancels or changes a plan.
The third consultation is around tools that providers give their subscribers to manage their plans, like online portals. And the fourth is about whether service providers should have to provide information in a standardized way to make it easier for Canadians to compare plans. To take a well-known example—we are all used to seeing nutrition labels when we visit the grocery store. The idea would be to set common standards and methodologies for generating that information for broadband services, so that it can be conveyed in a consistent manner from one provider to the next.
Our plan is to hold a public hearing later this year to discuss this in further detail. We are conscious that requirements like these could impose burdens on telecom service providers of different sizes. At the end of the day, we have to balance those burdens, and on whom they’re imposed, against the value they add in safeguarding the competitive process and the interests of consumers. That is a job we take seriously and undertake carefully.
So the framework continues to advance. Looking ahead, there are quite a few more items on our consumer protections plan that we will be tackling, and on which we will be soliciting your interventions and input.
One of our upcoming proceedings will look at our consumer codes: the Internet Code, as well as the Television Service Provider Code, and the Wireless Code. All three set out consumer rights and obligations that it is your job to safeguard. All three are administered by the CCTS, with which many of you have some experience. Well, the three codes have a number of provisions in common or that overlap. We think combining them could provide more clarity, simplicity and consistency across all services. We will be consulting on that.
We will also continue to focus on reliability and the impact on Canadians when there is an outage or disruption. As some of you are aware, we have a basic, interim outage reporting framework in place. But we have also consulted on moving towards a more sustainable outage reporting and remediation framework that could include clear communication with subscribers, and even in certain circumstances, refunds for extended lost service.
Again, all of these measures involve trade-offs. To which providers should they apply, if any, and in what circumstances? How can we simplify, standardize, and align any requirements we do create with existing ways of working, tools, and supports to minimize administrative burden? How can we ensure what is required is focused on improving subscriber trust and experience and on protecting the competitive process — not on consuming provider resources? In other words, how do we make sure the juice is worth the squeeze?
Do visit our website, and work with your trade associations and advisors, to stay up-to-date on these proceedings and on our progress with our consumer protection workstreams. As always, your input matters a great deal to what we do. When you put it on the record of our proceedings in the form of written interventions, we’re able to take it into account in the rules we adopt and how we structure them. And, in turn, when we do that work, we are working from our knowledge base of what we know and what we’ve seen — including the site visits we’ve done to various telcos of all sizes throughout the country.
Security, reliability, and resiliency
At the CRTC, we are part of a larger government effort to protect Canadians from spam, malware, phishing and other electronic threats. We have all read the headlines over the last few years about botnets, which are networks of infected devices. In 2022, we found that Canadians need better protections from attack infrastructures, like botnets, and decided to develop a framework to allow Internet providers to block malicious traffic, provided they do so responsibly. We eventually tasked an industry steering committee, on which I know some of you served, to help develop standards consistent with our guiding principles for when such blocking is permitted: necessity, customer privacy, accountability, transparency and accuracy.
The working group filed its report with the CRTC. Our staff have been conducting a thorough analysis of the report and the comments filed in response to it. We will be publishing our decision this spring, so more to come on this front.
But this file has not stood still. Late last year, everyone in our sector sat up straight and paid attention when public news stories about what Microsoft dubbed “Salt Typhoon” hacking into, and intercepting traffic on, the networks of nine major U.S. telcos — including Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and others. One of the events that closely followed was the U.S. Federal Communications Commission being called on to require telcos to meet baseline cybersecurity requirements, including annual vulnerability testing.
Virtually every regulated sector, from energy to rail to securities, has baseline cybersecurity requirements for sector companies. Speaking personally, I don’t see why telecommunications should be any different. I am sure some of you followed the progress of Bill C-26, which proposed to establish the Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act. Although the future of that Bill is uncertain, we know that this issue is top-of-mind for both government and the private sector. And I know that, in general, Canadian telcos are extensively involved in cybersecurity and in key working groups to cooperate on it.
We at the CRTC stand ready to do whatever part we’re called on to play to help ensure that the important goal of sector-wide baselines is achieved. At the same time, so many of the standards and certifications out there are so similar to one another. What standards are you able to meet, or certifications are you able to obtain, to help demonstrate and formalize your network hygiene? In my view, there is no reason for any telco of any size to wait on taking basic, practical steps to ensure they are fully secured. So now is a good time to do so.
Conclusion
I think that is a good place for me to wrap up today, as we have now come full circle: everything I have discussed today comes back to the CRTC’s overarching goals for the telecommunications sector.
We want a telecommunications sector that works for telcos of all sizes, and for Canadians with their range of locations and needs. One where real choice and robust competition lead to lower prices for Canadians, promote investment in high-quality networks, and nurture the entrepreneurial spirit that fills gaps responsively and well. Just as you steward your subscribers’ connections to the digital world, we at the CRTC are the stewards for the playing field on which you do it. Earlier I put a bit of a regulatory spin on “see something, say something” to help underline the opportunity to make sure we optimize the way that that playing field is structured.
So I’ll close with my usual message. Take a minute to get involved. To talk to us. To reach out to your regional CRTC Commissioner, wherever you may be in the country, to have your voice heard. To intervene in our proceedings, whether directly or through organizations like CanWISP, and make sure that the rules and frameworks we develop and revise take your voices, experiences, situations, and concerns into account.
Thank you. As usual, I can’t speak to matters currently or imminently before the CRTC. But, as long as that’s clear, I’d be glad to try and take questions that I can speak to.