Telecom's top brass lock horns at CRTC hearings

TELECOM REPORTER

Hearings at the CRTC this week have been at times bizarre, hilarious, incredibly tense and hugely symbolic.

At issue is whether large telecom providers, such as BCE Inc.'s Bell Canada and Rogers Communications Inc., will share newer, more advanced networks with small resellers who already lease space on existing networks.

The problematic irony for the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which is often criticized for failing to deal with changing technology, is that these hearings deal with the future. From Monday until Thursday, when hearings concluded, both the regulator and the companies it regulates have grappled with one problem: Companies were asked to discuss future investments and business negotiations with competitors present.

"We'd negotiate anything. Bite me. This is bullshit," Michael Hennessy, Telus Corp.'s senior vice-president for regulatory and government affairs, told the commission on Thursday, after being asked repeatedly how Telus would negotiate.

Billions of dollars and the future rollout of advanced technology in Canada are at stake. But companies were understandably cagey. Earlier, BCE president and chief executive officer George Cope, said he did not want "to talk about future technology with our cable competitors in the room."

Of course, companies submit reams of documents ahead of hearings and many of these are kept private. But not everything can be done behind closed doors. The regulator always has to consider the public interest of consumer choice and competitive advantage, given some of the companies under discussion are former monopolies with a head start on infrastructure deployment.

Greg MacDonald, a telecom analyst at National Bank Financial Inc., said the regulator has done an admirable job of balancing corporate, government and public concerns. Big companies, however, say they won't invest if they have to share. And small resellers say they could be forced out of the market if kept off next-generation telecom infrastructure, such as fibre optic cable.

Because of this, the usual mixture of tedium and tension at these sorts of hearings veered more towards conflict. "I'm tired of being misled by you guys not answering my questions," Konrad von Finckenstein, CRTC chairman, told telecom executives.

Matters were not helped by the complex technologies being discussed. Folksy analogies were plentiful: Bell's Mr. Cope employed Tim Horton's; and Ken Engelhart, Rogers' vice-president of regulatory affairs, said cable companies "are the Rodney Dangerfield of the telecom industry. We don't get no respect."

The only thing on which all parties could agree was that a PA announcement interrupting Bell executives was both funny and troubling: "We wish to inform you that the water in this building is now safe to drink."