The CRTC will hold lockups for the news media and industry next Monday and Tuesday for the release decisions on wholesale Internet access and on what should be done with the funds remaining in Bell Canada’s deferral accounts. 

Both lockups will start at 2 p.m. and end at 4 p.m., when the decisions are publicly released.

Both decisions—the wholesale access decision on Monday and the deferral accounts decision on Tuesday—will be released at the same time that trading markets close for the day in Toronto and New York.

The lockups, at the CRTC's offices in Gatineau, Que., allow media and industry representatives to get a sneak preview of the decisions before they are released to the public. Representatives who enter the lockups are not allowed out until the public release of the decision and cannot communicate with people outside the lockup.

The wholesale access decision will be a critical one for Internet providers.

In late May and early June, the commission held hearings to determine what kind of access third-party Internet providers like Primus Telecommunications Canada Inc. and TekSavvy Solutions Inc., should have to the networks of incumbent carriers like Bell Canada and Rogers Communications Inc.

Small, third-party Internet service providers (ISPs) argued that they should have “unbundled” access to the “central offices” of the incumbents’ networks, allowing them to build out their own facilities without constructing a network from scratch.

The incumbents said unbundling could hamper facilities-based competition—among carriers that own their own networks—because granting closer access to the central offices of the incumbents’ networks would impede their ability to roll out bandwidth-eating services like Internet protocol television (IPTV).

The CRTC’s deferral accounts decision will examine funds collected from Bell Canada’s urban phone customers during the last price cap period, 2002 to 2006. The fund, worth $463 million, was to be used to expand broadband Internet access in rural and remote areas where it is not financially viable to do so without a subsidy.

But instead of following an earlier plan to bring wireline DSL Internet to rural and remote communities, Bell released plans to use the funds to finance the expansion of its wireless HSPA+ network in rural Ontario and Quebec.

Bell argued its wireless plan would “future proof” rural communities better than wireline DSL.

Videotron Ltd., a subsidiary of Quebecor Media Inc., criticized the plan, arguing that using the funds for an expansion of Bell’s HSPA+ network would give the company an unfair competitive advantage in the mobile marketplace.

Videotron also argued that an HSPA+ network is not a suitable replacement for a DSL network because Bell’s mobile data plans are limited by monthly download caps ranging from 2 GB to 5 GB. 

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