Transcription, Audience du 11 juin 2025

Les participants et l'endroit

Tenue à :

Centre de Conférence
Portage IV
140, Promenade du Portage
Gatineau (Québec)

Participants :

• Président de l’audience : Adam Scott
• Membres : Bram Abramson, Conseiller, Ontario
  Ellen Desmond, Conseillère, Région de l’Atlantique et Nunavut
  Nirmala Naidoo, Conseillère, Alberta et Territoires du Nord-Ouest
  Stéphanie Paquette, Conseillère, Québec
• Conseiller juridique : Michael Ostroff
• Secrétaires de l’audience : Alexanne Patry, Jade Roy
• Gérant de l’audience : Albert Xie

Table des matières

Présentations

900 Canadian Telecommunications Association

1077 Telus

1337 Bell Canada

1590 OpenMedia & Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic

Transcription

Gatineau (Québec)
11 juin 2025
Ouverture de l'audience à 9 h 00

Gatineau (Québec)

‑‑‑ L'audience débute le mercredi 11 juin 2025 à 9 h 00

898 THE SECRETARY: We will not begin this morning with the presentation from Canadian Telecommunication Associate.

899 When you are ready, you can introduce yourself and you may begin.

Présentation

900 MR. SMITH: Thank you.

901 Good morning, Chair and Commissioners. My name is Eric Smith, and I’m here on behalf of the Canadian Telecommunications Association. Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this important consultation on making it easier for Canadians to shop for internet services.

902 We fully agree with the Commission that consumers must be able to make informed decisions. That is why our members maintain high standards of transparency regarding the advertising of internet services.

903 Key product and plan details such as price, speed, data limits, term and discounts are clearly presented at point of sale, such as product websites. These practices reflect years of continuous consumer engagement through which service providers have learned what is important to consumers. And the data shows this approach is working.

904 According to the Commission’s own research 72 percent of Canadians feel very or moderately knowledgeable about internet service shopping, 85 percent are very satisfied, somewhat satisfied or neutral about the information they find when shopping for internet services, 83 percent feel the same about the amount of information they are able to find, while 81 percent feel the same about being able to find the specific information they really want to have. Meanwhile, only 13 percent of Canadians identified specific types of information as being hard to find or difficult to understand.

905 When asked about specific types of product information, two percent or fewer reported difficulty finding or understanding any of the listed main product attributes, including speed and reliability. Most notably, only one percent said it is difficult to compare services, prices or providers.

906 In short, current practices, driven by intense market competition, provide Canadians with clear, relevant and accurate information about internet services that make it easy to shop for and compare service offerings.

907 Despite this, it’s been proposed that Canada adopt a standardized broadband consumer label like the one introduced by the FCC in the United States. We strongly urge the Commission not to pursue this approach. Not only are standardized labels unnecessary, but mandating labels would misdirect scarce resources from expanding and improving broadband networks as well as the development of service innovations that can make a real difference to consumers.

908 Our written submissions in this proceeding provide a comprehensive response to the questions posed by the Commission in its consultation document, but I’ll highlight four key points.

909 First, Bill C‑288 does not mandate a consumer broadband label. The purpose of Bill C‑288 is to ensure the accuracy of broadband speed advertising even though the Commission’s own performance tests indicate that internet speed advertising is accurate. It requires providers to disclose “typical download and upload speeds during peak periods”. It does not mandate a broadband label, nor does it require disclosure of other product attributes. The advertising of broadband speeds should be the narrow focus of this proceeding.

910 Second, there is no clear evidence that a standardized label is necessary or will benefit consumers. No proof has been offered that the FCC’s new label has helped U.S. consumers. In fact, just yesterday we heard from Cogeco, who has operations in the U.S., and they reported that only two percent of their customers even look at the labels.

911 There’s also no evidence which suggests that consumers in countries without standardized labels like Canada, the UK or Australia, struggle more than Americans when shopping for internet services.

912 Supporters of standardized labels fail to acknowledge that service providers’ existing practices for prominently displaying to consumers almost all the same information found in the FCC broadband label. This has made it easy for consumers to find relevant information and compare providers and plans, as evidenced by the Commission’s own consumer survey.

913 Supporters of standardized labels also fail to acknowledge that service providers are already required to provide key contract information to consumers pursuant to the Internet Code, and that the Commission’s own consumer code survey shows that most Canadians have not made a complaint about their internet service in the past 12 months and most find their internet contract clear and easy to understand.

914 Some intervenors point to the portion of the Commission’s consumer survey where respondents were asked about the concept of a standardized format and shown a sample broadband label. Participants were asked whether this type of information or label would be “helpful” or “unhelpful” and whether it would make it easier to compare or more difficult to compare plans.

915 When one considers the design of these questions, it is not a surprise that more respondents chose helpful than unhelpful and easier to compare than more difficult to compare. However, saying something would be helpful rather than unhelpful does not mean it is a better solution than existing practices for providing information to consumers.

916 Participants were not asked to compare different ways that information can be displayed. They were not asked to consider how service providers in Canada already provide product and plan information, nor were they asked to review how service providers in other countries, like the UK or Australia, provide information, which is very similar to how it is done in Canada today.

917 They were also not asked to consider the information they already receive from service providers pursuant to the Internet Code. Additionally, they were not asked to consider whether a standardized format or consumer label would be desired even if the cost of building complex systems and processes to produce such labels would divert scarce resources from improving broadband services or might result in an increase to their monthly bill.

918 Without providing any context or asking survey participants to consider these related factors, the results of the survey questions about standardized formats and labels are of little value and should be given little weight by the Commission.

919 Third, there’s no need to prescribe product information beyond peak period speeds. Market forces, together with the requirements of the Internet Code, have resulted in consumers being provided with the key information regarding service plans and contractual information in an accessible and easy‑to‑understand manner. There’s no need to require service providers to abandon these existing practices in favour of unproven and costly standardized formats.

920 Similarly, we urge caution on expanding the scope of required disclosures to include service metrics beyond broadband speed. Bill C‑288 was introduced to address concerns around broadband speed advertising, not latency, jitter, packet loss or over‑subscription ratios.

921 In fact, requiring providers to disclose low relevance metrics risks confusing or misleading consumers, especially when such metrics may vary based on factors outside a provider’s control, such as customer equipment or environmental conditions. As the Commission’s own research shows and service providers’ experience confirms, most consumers don’t ask for this information and don’t consider it when selecting a plan.

922 And fourth and lastly, as for how broadband speeds should be tested and disclosed and how peak periods should be identified, we recommend following the lead of other jurisdictions in designating a single peak period that is consistent across the country. We also support flexibility in how providers test and report speeds.

923 Countries like the UK, Australia and the U.S. allow providers to use internal, third‑party or industry‑standard tools to measure speeds. There is no one‑size‑fits‑all methodology that works across networks, technologies or geographies.

924 In conclusion, service providers already deliver clear, relevant and accessible information to Canadians. The current system works. No convincing evidence has been presented that a standardized label would provide a measurable benefit to Canadian consumers. The U.S. label is an outlier, it’s largely unproven, and is currently subject to re‑examination under the FCC’s recently announced “Delete Delete Delete” proceeding.

925 Other countries such as the UK and Australia have not mandated labels and provide flexibility in how providers disclose broadband speed information. They also rely on general advertising laws to address any concerns about misleading or false advertising. Canada should do the same.

926 Imposing a mandatory label format would require service providers to abandon effective, consumer‑tested practices in favour of a rigid and unproven standardized format. This would create unnecessary cost and complexity, provide no material benefit to consumers, and divert resources away from the more important objective of improving broadband networks in rural and remote communities.

927 It would also run counter to the 2023 Policy Direction which requires the Commission to ensure the measures it imposes are efficient and proportionate to their purpose and to base its decisions on sound and recent evidence.

928 We urge the Commission to focus narrowly on implementing Bill C‑288, ensuring disclosure of typical peak period speeds without layering on additional regulatory burdens that are unnecessary, unproven and costly.

929 I thank you, and I welcome your questions.

930 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much, Mr. Smith.

931 We’re going to go to Commissioner Desmond to start us off.

932 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Good morning.

933 MR. SMITH: Good morning.

934 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you for being here and thank you for your submissions and your opening statement. I have read all of your materials and I have about six or seven key questions that I’d like to perhaps focus on.

935 Maybe we could start with your intervention and the executive summary. So I don’t know if you have that in front of you ‑‑

936 MR. SMITH: Sure.

937 COMMISSIONER DESMOND:  ‑‑ but I’d like to maybe draw your attention to some of the key submissions you’ve made and ask some questions that relate to that submission.

938 MR. SMITH: That’s the original intervention? Yeah. Okay.

939 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you.

940 So I’d like to go maybe first to paragraph 1 and 2. And I think you emphasized this as well in your opening statement, that your members disclose relevant information, you make the offerings easy to understand and that it would be important to provide not too much information which may lead to consumers being confused or maybe misunderstanding information.

941 So I’d like to just drill down a little bit on that and ask you, could you speak to what information is provided by all providers? So what is the key information that your members generally provide that consumers do fine useful?

942 And then as maybe a second question related to that, how could that be improved? Like what, if anything, could be done to improve the clarity, maybe, of the contracts, the length of the contracts that are being offered?

943 So what is provided and how could that be improved in some way?

944 MR. SMITH: Great question.

945 I think what’s important to recognize is we’re in a very dynamic market and observers in the industry and people who pay attention to how plans and products are advertised over the years will see that it evolves. It evolves on how products and plans change, it evolves how technology changes, and it evolves based on customer feedback and interaction with customers as to what’s important to them.

946 So today, you know, I haven’t done an exhaustive comparison of every carrier’s website, but generally speaking, they take an approach that is designed to give the most relevant information up front they know consumers are looking at immediately, which are things like price, term, any promotional speeds, that type of information, and then, again, part of the evolution of learning through interactions with consumers as to what works and what helps them find information, they’ll often provide additional information through pop‑up windows or dropdown menus that provide more details. That’s, you know, based on best practices, you know, with user interface experts, et cetera, as how best to present information.

947 And if you look at how it’s done in other countries, Australia and the UK, it’s very similar. I provided, I think, in my submissions some screenshots from carriers in other countries. It would be hard if you weren’t told they were from other countries to really distinguish it from how Canadian carriers do it.

948 As to how it can be improved, I think that we have to be careful. You know, the best people to advise on improvements are the carriers themselves, who are always working to tweak and improve.

949 One carrier may experiment with a way of displaying information and find that gains a lot of traction with consumers and they like it, and other carriers will say, hey, that’s a great idea. We should pick up on that and present that information in that way.

950 That’s what’s great about a competitive market. That’s how new innovations are introduced, tested and then embraced by others.

951 I think we have to be careful about, you know, searching for some silver bullet that we should mandate and it remains static and isn’t open to, you know, the evolution and the dynamism of market forces.

952 So I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to say how it can be improved. I think that, over the years, carriers have gotten better and better and will continue to get better in providing information, relevant information to their consumers and I think they’re doing a good job today, as is evidenced by the survey results that Earnscliffe did for the Commission.

953 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you.

954 So you’ve talked about price, terms and speeds. So now if I could just turn to paragraph 4 of your submission.

955 And in that paragraph, you talk about the importance of how providers present the information and then allowing flexibility.

956 So you know, could the Commission consider providing information to consumers that’s consistent like price, terms and speeds? I’m not talking about the format, necessarily, but the information itself, consistent information, but also allow flexibility. Where is that balance?

957 So what would be the risk or the harm of asking providers to consistently provide speed, price terms, but then also allowing flexibility.

958 MR. SMITH: Well, I guess to answer the question a bit is, first, why does the Commission need to mandate requiring something that clearly industry’s already doing. Secondly, if ‑‑ there’d be a temptation, I think, to add to that list, and that’s what our main concern is, adding things that are not relevant to consumers or could potentially mislead consumers.

959 I imagine someone may have a question for me around the metric of over‑subscription ratio. That’s a perfect example of a metric that is actually more likely to mislead and confuse consumers than actually help them because it really isn’t relevant to real‑world experience. And we heard that from Cogeco yesterday and I think you’ll hear similar from other ISPs, and I’d be happy to talk about that metric more later.

960 So I think, you know, if the market is working, there’s no market failure, I’m wary of the Commission saying, well, you’re already doing this, what’s the problem with us giving you a list of the things you’re already doing because the temptation is for everyone to say, well, let’s add more things to that list. And I think that that’s a slippery slope.

961 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Maybe now we could look, then, at paragraph 5 of your submission.

962 And you do point out that, under the new section 24.2, service providers must provide public information about typical download and upload speeds during peak periods.

963 MR. SMITH: Correct.

964 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: So I’d like to explore what that means to you and how we can satisfy that requirement.

965 So what is a workable definition of typical speeds during peak periods?

966 MR. SMITH: So there’s two parts to that, as I really see it, is there’s what’s a typical speed and over what ‑‑ how is that measured, how is that reported, and then what is a peak period. So maybe I’ll start with the peak period first.

967 As I made clear in our intervention, it would be incredibly onerous and not really beneficial to require service providers to try to, in an ongoing, very highly localized area, try to measure and adjust what peak period is for reporting purposes.

968 There is no one peak period in the real world. Peak period is a factor of all kinds of elements, whether it’s the day of the week, the time of the year, you know, seasonal, specific events that are going on. So what other countries have done, the UK, the U.S. and Australia, have designated a period of time which they think is a reasonable proxy for peak period. Typically, it’s been either 7:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. or I think in the case ‑‑ I may have my countries mixed up, but I think it’s the UK has 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. They’ve designated that time period and they said that is what you have to report, is whether it ‑‑ whatever terminology they use, busy period, peak period, typical period, that typical ‑‑ or sorry, peak or busy period, that’s the period we’re talking about. And then you have to, ISP, measure ‑‑ do measurements and report what typical ‑‑ the typical speed would be.

969 Again, different countries have approached it differently.

970 First of all, they’ve all provided flexibility in how you measure. They’ve all allowed companies to either use commercial tools, third‑party tools in some cases. You know, Australia, they’re a little different because they have their national broadband metric ‑‑ network, so they do their own measurements of their own network, and so it’s an option for carriers to use those measurements.

971 And then they use different criteria for what is typical. I think the UK, it’s at least 50 percent of your customers have to be experiencing or be delivering that speed to 50 percent of your install base.

972 And so that’s ‑‑ you know, I think you’ll hear other recommendations for what is typical, but that’s ‑‑ you know, that’s, I think, what the legislation requires the Commission to come up with in terms of what is ‑‑ what is typical and what the threshold is.

973 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: So I appreciate that you have identified two parts to that particular requirement. With respect to ‑‑ you talked about measurement and how there’s no one approach to measurement. And I’m curious if you have a recommendation as to what measurement would be for the Commission to consider.

974 MR. SMITH: How to measure speed?

975 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Correct, yes.

976 MR. SMITH: Yeah. Again, I think that there needs to be flexibility.

977 At the end of the day, the backstop that you have is general advertising laws. If you look at, for example, Australia, they give guidance to the industry of reporting of broadband speeds, but they don’t prescribe how to do it and they say you don’t even have to follow our guidance. What you have to do is follow the law. You can’t advertise in a false and misleading way.

978 And if they get a complaint, there’s a complaint from a consumer that says this carrier was misleading or false in their advertising of speeds, there’s existing laws to deal with that.

979 And it’s very similar in the UK as well.

980 And as I said before, all of them allow flexibility because they don’t, ultimately, care what testing methodology you use as long as it’s truthful and it’s accurate. The onus is on the carrier to be accurate, which they are today, and the Commission’s own testing has established that.

981 If there is a concern or an allegation that they’re not accurate, then we have laws in Canada dealing with false and misleading advertising that can deal with that.

982 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: So just I want to explore that a little bit further because I think we’ve heard from consumer groups who have indicated that what is advertised is not necessarily always what has been experienced. And, you know, is that a regionality factor, is it a congestion factor, is it because urban and rural, you know, you’re going to have a different experience?

983 So how can we address that? How can we provide assurance to customers that maybe aren’t in the urban areas that when they purchase a plan that they will have the speeds that they are buying? How can that be addressed?

984 MR. SMITH: Well, you bring up a very good point. In the testimony from MP Mazier, from Manitoba Coalition, from disabilities groups was very important because while this consultation has sort of morphed into a broadband label consultation, what you really heard, at least what I heard from those intervenors, is they’re concerned about a disparity of service quality in rural, remote communities and urban centres in Canada.

985 I think we all recognize that there is a divide that still exists. Our industry is working really hard. We’re investing over $12 billion a year in capital expenditures to build, expand and enhance networks. And in areas where it may not be a full business case to do that, we’re working with the Commission and the industry funded Broadband Fund and with ISED and the Universal Broadband Fund to close that gap as quickly as possible.

986 That is what I think is going to address concerns of rural Canadians, not a labelling mandate. It’s investment. And any regulatory mandate that diverts investment away from that prime objective is hindering our ability to bring that level of service to rural Canadians.

987 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: And I don't disagree with your comments. I think that’s a priority. But when consumers are searching for and purchasing plans, you know, I think there’s a need to assure the customer that what they’re buying is what they’re going to receive. And I think what you’re suggesting is that there’d be no one metric for measurement, that that should be up to the ISP.

988 But to go back to your question about peak hours and, you know, what information should be provided around peak hours, which is identified in the legislation, what is your view on that? I guess, I think you're suggesting that maybe we pick a window of time that would indicate a peak hour?

989 MR. SMITH: Yeah, absolutely. And just to go back a little bit, what you said in case I misstated it, I'm not saying that there should not be one metric for establishing speed. So there is, you know, megabit per second, it's the methodology for testing, that there does not to need to be one standard for testing. As I said before, carriers are already obligated to be truthful in their advertising.

990 When it comes to, you know, the question of peak period, as I said again, I think it's next to impossible, and if it's not impossible it's unjustifiably costly to ask carriers to establish what a peak period is, you know, on a neighborhood level, or region level, because in reality that's going to change all the time.

991 What other jurisdictions have done, and I think makes sense, is for the Commission to designate a window of time which is consistent across the country by their time zone and says that this is a reasonable proxy for when we typically expect in normal conditions traffic would be probably at the highest, and that is what carriers must advertise.

992 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Just as a follow up to that, as I understand it when consumers are searching for a plan, often they are able to put in their postal code and they can see what service is available in their location. Does that indicate that the level of detail and the information that is available to ISPs, you know, could be shared with consumers, more detailed information that would be useful to consumers when they are doing their shopping?

993 MR. SMITH: Useful? No, I mean, I think that as we have seen, that both on the ISP’s experience and the consumer surveys, is there's a very small set of information that consumers are really looking for, and it's things like price, term, any data limits if some exist, and speed. And that is what is provided.

994 You know, the putting in your address is really just to check to see if that service is available. So for example, if a carrier has ‑‑ provides fiber optic services, you need to put your address in to make sure that they actually serve your area, house, your neighborhood. That's really the purpose for that.

995 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: You’ve referred to the experience of the UK and Australia, you know, as examples. But has there been any demonstrable evidence of how successful that approach has been?

996 MR. SMITH: Yeah. So first of all, we have to look at the context. So as I mentioned before, in Canada we really haven't established or shown that ‑‑ in fact, we said the opposite ‑‑ that there's a problem with how speeds are advertised. Your own studies indicate that.

997 Those other countries were different. In Australia, the NBN network was plagued by technology issues and cost overruns and really poor service. If you compare Canada to Australia, Australia has very good mobile networks, they have very poor broadband networks, very low speeds. And in fact, many Australians are abandoning fixed or wireline networks just to go with fixed wireless because ‑‑ or even just using their mobile phone because it works better. So they were trying to address real world problem.

998 The same with the UK, you had ‑‑ they found ‑‑ they regularly found that carriers were advertising a speed when in some cases only 10 percent of their user base could actually get that speed. So when they brought in guidelines, they did see some improvement.

999 I know in the UK at least, I don't know what it was the government or some organization, you know, claimed that they were successful in making sure that carriers were being more accurate in their advertising. But again, as I said, we don't really have that problem here, so it's a different set of circumstances.

1000 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay. I think those are all of my questions. Thank you very much.

1001 MR. SMITH: Thank you.

1002 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.

1003 And we'll go to Commissioner Naidoo next please.

1004 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Hi there. Thank you so much for being here today.

1005 MR. SMITH: My pleasure.

1006 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: I wanted to talk to you about labels. Some food companies and restaurants provide nutritional labels, plus they also offer information on their websites. Those two practices generally, I think most people would say, compliment each other. Someone would argue that there's actually not any downside to customers, because it's actually just access to information.

1007 So I’m wondering why would having current practices plus labels be a bad thing in your view, or would it be a bad thing?

1008 MR. SMITH: Well, I think one, it would be redundant. Potentially it would also, depending what the prescribed label looks like and what information must be provided, it could be misleading and confusing consumers.

1009 And there's obviously the cost as well, as I mentioned a number times, you would be diverting scarce resources to replicate something that ‑‑ the provision of information that already exists. The key information that's relevant to consumers is already provided and you're diverting resources to replicate that in some other static format when that money can be better spent an invested on higher priorities. Priorities that I think we share with the Commission.

1010 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right. So I just want to flesh it out.

1011 So as you say, some consumers may have enough information, clearly though some feel that they don't have enough information. I think about elderly, we've all got elderly people in our lives, I’m thinking about people who may ‑‑ about meeting people where they are, you know, as far as meeting them with the information they need.

1012 So what is the downside in your view, of ensuring that every consumer has as much information as they need to make an informed decision in a standardized way? And essentially, I guess for lack of a better way to describe it, casting a wider information net?

1013 MR. SMITH: Well, more information is not always a good thing. We all know that you can be inundated with information and it can cause confusion, it can cause paralysis in decision making. And as I said, you know, there’s no evidence that a standard label, like the FCC label, has benefited anyone. It would really be pure speculation.

1014 And I think as I mentioned before, I think you know, market forces and competition work really well to serve consumers. Because what happens is we're all ‑‑ all our members want to serve consumers well. And yes, there's a selfish component to that because they want customers, they want to gain customers and they want to retain customers.

1015 So they were to make sure customers have the best and most relevant information. And if one carrier says, you know what, we've been hearing a lot from our frontline folks that consumers are looking for information X. Well, they're going to say, well, you know what, may give us a competitive advantage because we're going to ‑‑ people are looking for that information, we're going provided to them. That potentially will win customers for us. And if that is successful other carriers will do that.

1016 It's the same with bringing in innovations, you know, our carriers are always looking to not only inform consumers, but empower consumers. So they brought in things like digital only brands, account management tools, testing tools so that people can test their speed. This is the way market forces work to evolve to serve Canadians.

1017 A static label is really a bet, a speculation bet on little evidence that it will benefit consumers. But you'd be betting with money that could be better served, you know, fulfilling other priorities that we know are important and we know that putting money towards them will benefit consumers.

1018 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right. Those are all my questions, thank you.

1019 MR. SMITH: Thanks.

1020 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thanks.

1021 I'm going to sneak in a question from the Chair before I go to Commissioner Abramson.

1022 So you spoke general competition laws as a backstop. Does ISP use of the “up to” in all of their advertising, could that give consumers the impression that whatever service they’re provided has been satisfied and that there is no recourse available to them? What’s the effect of the “up to” language that's persistent in marketing?

1023 MR. SMITH: Well, you know, I haven't been involved, I think, in the industry to know the history of using “up to”. I know we heard testimony yesterday that that has become kind of standard language used not only Canada but in other jurisdictions.

1024 And I think it's intended to convey that, you know, despite what speeds the network itself can provide, there are other factors that could impact what you receive in your home for example. You know, whether it's your Wi‑Fi router, whether it's the devices you're using, how many people in the house are using, etcetera.

1025 It is not used to suggest that that's, you know, like the UK example, that you know only 10 percent of our customers, you know, are getting that speed, but we can advertise it as “up to” that speed, because your own tests ‑‑ the commission's own tests show that's not the case. So again, the origins of that wording, I don't know. But I don't see it being used as some type of, you know, get out of jail free card. It’s really to just reflect the reality that there are some variabilities an individual's experience.

1026 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.

1027 We’ll go to Commissioner Abramson, please.

1028 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks. I’ll just continuing that theme before I ask a different question about service quality metrics.

1029 But you know it's interesting, on the “up to” speeds, and I'll have to confess in a former life as counsel I inserted the words “up to” into many documents. I'm looking at the Australian speed claims principles though, Mr. Smith. You know, principle 2 is in part that theoretical speeds taken from technical specifications should not be advertised without reference to typical busy period speeds.

1030 So I guess in a sense, what we see in the legislation that's been adopted guide us isn't too different from that principle number 2, that speeds ought to be advertised with reference to typical busy period speeds, rather than just the line speed or the theoretical throughput that can be achieved if nothing we're connected at the other end. Would you agree?

1031 MR. SMITH: Yeah. Well, certainly legislation says that one of the metrics that has to be disclosed, or the only specific one it mentions is typical speeds. It doesn't preclude use of “up to”.

1032 So if you look at an example, you know, if an ISP is putting an advertisement on a billboard by a highway to advertise their services, they're not going to list, here are all of our different services, and here are our different speeds, and here are our typical. They may choose to say, you know, “Join us, we give speeds up to you know, 1.5 gigabit per second”.

1033 I think what the legislation requires is that when you go to a specific plan or something, there must be what is referenced as the typical upload download speed during peak period.

1034 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: So it shouldn't crowd out the reference to the theoretical speed taken from technical specifications, but should be perhaps supplemental to it. Is that your submission?

1035 MR. SMITH: Well, I think it's up to ‑‑ you know, that is before the Commission is to say what is meant by typical speeds? And as I said before, you know, different jurisdictions use different parameters. You know, whether it’s you must be able to show that up to 50 percent of your install base can be expected to receive this speed. But that come out in terms of how that is defined.

1036 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: There’s a Tom Waites song which has as part of its lyrics, the large print giveth and the small print take it away. And I guess one of the concerns that I imagine the nutritional labels are intended to respond to is the idea that, you know, you might have a billboard advertising one speed and then the fine print might say something different.

1037 But I agree with you, at the end of the day there are different ways to address that and we're exploring some of them here.

1038 One last thing on nutritional labels, since you’ve got me going down that road, and then I'll move on to service quality. You know, and it's been interesting, we've had an evolving conversation as to whether these things are useful, whether they are consulted by consumers, likely to be consulted by consumers and so on.

1039 And you know, we had an intriguing response yesterday I believe it was Ms. Peggy Barker, who was with one of the consumer groups, talking about her work many years ago helping implement textile labeling obligations. And you know, one of the things that she sort of talked about, or implied, was a bit of an adoption curve.

1040 And so, you know, it had me thinking about nutrition labels where in a way historically we have seen something a little bit similar. You know, it's almost like at the beginning back in the ‘70s I believe, when they were first proposed there was a lot of resistance. They were said to be, you know, cost of compliance would be high, consumers would be confused or overwhelmed, or wouldn't understand or care. You know, mention of bad ingredients would scare off consumers and so on.

1041 Gradually, resistance gave way to regulation obviously because they were adopted, and normalization, and then perhaps most recently platformization. So we now see all kinds of, you know, online and mobile dieting apps and the rest of it, that use that information to then build on top of it. Do you think it's possible that broadband nutritional labels might?

1042 And you know, granted Canada is a unique case. I know the FCC for instance, in their broadband nutritional labeling it's mostly about price, something that we already hopefully cover off, and that's something that I'll address with some of the ISPs as they come up in our critical information summary obligations. But nonetheless, do you think if there were a broadband nutritional label of some kind, its value would sort of be in how it shapes the ecosystem over a longer term?

1043 MR. SMITH: I ‑‑ I mean, maybe I'm too cynical. I think it would be ignored by most people. I think the examples, you know, textile industry and food industry, very different industries. The textile labeling was brought in to ensure that suppliers were not misrepresenting what fibers were in there, you know, passing off synthetic for cotton. Food labeling started off back in the day before you know, the standardized labels to ensure people weren't eating poison. So there was public safety and health concerns.

1044 This is very different. As I said before, if it's not broken don't try to fix it. Don’t divert resources away trying to create a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. We are providing that information. Consumers say that they are getting the information they require. The vast majority are saying that. One percent in the survey said that they difficulty finding or understanding a particular term, 1 percent. I don't think that's a foundation for bringing in a regulatory mandate around broadband labels.

1045 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you. And thank you for helping us fill out the record on that.

1046 Let me now turn as I promised to service quality. This morning, you know, you said the advertising of broadband speeds should be the narrow focus of this proceeding. And later, that Bill C‑288 was introduced to address concerns around broadband speed advertising, not latency, jitter, packet loss, or oversubscription ratios.

1047 You know, when I look at what Bill C‑288 has inserted into the Telecom Act, it says that Canadian carriers that offer fixed broadband shall make available both typical download and upload speeds during peak periods, and service quality metrics during peak periods.

1048 So that's an obligation that the Act has now added that is separate from the obligation around speeds. What sort of service quality metrics during peak periods do you think that Canadian carriers ought to make available in order to fulfill that obligation?

1049 MR. SMITH: Well, I just wanted to find a quote here. So if we look at C‑288, it does mention what you said, but it provides a lot of discretion to the Commission to determine what if any metrics other than speed should be required. If you look at record of the parliamentary debates, if you look at the Senate committee hearings, which I had the pleasure of participating in, and the INDU committee, it was all focused on speed, it was focused on rural communities.

1050 The words latency were mentioned I think only in the context ‑‑ I stand to be corrected, but I think they were only mentioned really in the context of mentioning what's included in the FCC label. Other metrics were not mentioned.

1051 One of the experts who was arguing in favor of disclosure, cautioned Parliament too much information is a disservice. And if you look at the comments of MP Mazier in his testimony to Parliament, he said when the CRTC actually launches these hearing processes, that's where there is an opportunity to be flexible as well. There's lots of latitude in this. It's a discovery process to figure out how service providers are going to display or transmit their services for Canadians.

1052 So even then he was acknowledging that this ‑‑ because he acknowledged in his testimony yesterday, he's not an expert in this area, and this is the forum to determine what if anything needs to be required in addition to typical broadband speeds.

1053 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: So I just want to ‑‑ because I think this is an important point. I just want to make sure it is CTA’s submission that we could get away with specifying no service quality metrics and still meet the requirements of what the Act tells us to do; yes?

1054 MR. SMITH: Absolutely. I think in MP Mazier’s testimony before Parliament that that is really the invitation that he was saying. He's saying we as parliament are turning over to the Commission to determine it. And I think the evidence shows that there is not a need. You know, market will respond consumers’ needs and consumers’ desires.

1055 And you know, it's not ‑‑ some people say, well, what could it hurt? Well, the problem is that if you insert service metrics that are not relevant, or that could be misleading, not only do you confuse consumers, you suggest that one service may be better than another based on a metric, when in fact it's not. Oversubscription ratio is a great example of that.

1056 And you're actually almost telling careers, we want you to design your networks in an inefficient way to target these metrics which may not be relevant to consumers and may be misleading, rather than actually using your expertise to deliver the best service possible to consumers.

1057 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks. Now, I have to tell you, you know, we ran a proceeding that you may recall on universal broadband back in 2016. We considered the submissions of ISPs, most of whom are of the view that there was no need to establish quality of service criteria, and we went a different way.

1058 We said that high quality broadband internet access service, one of the important ways in which you determine, particularly in terms of the ability to deliver real time applications, is in ensuring there are low levels of three key service characteristics to provide a smooth experience to the Canadians who use them.

1059 So it's possible that we’ll go a different way then you had suggested again in this proceeding. If that were to be case, does the CTA have any view as to which quality service metrics ought to be required to be made available?

1060 MR. SMITH: Yeah, just going back too, you mentioned that proceeding was a while ago. Technologies have changed, networks continue to improve. I would argue that really, it's broadband speed or bandwidth which really the most reasonable practical proxy for, you know, residential internet users’ needs. I think as speeds improve, bandwidth improves, there's very few, you know, jitter sensitive or latency sensitive use cases.

1061 You know, if I'm an online competitive gamer for example, I may be concerned about that. But if I'm doing that's a competitor, I know I should use for example an ethernet connection at my home, or use different equipment to make sure I'm getting the best out of my bandwidth. But that's just not typical for residential users.

1062 So I think that you know, when people were using older technologies, maybe some of these things were more prevalent and more of a concern. But I think modern networks today, they are robust enough to handle most use cases. I'll go back to a couple of years, and we all remember COVID. I mean, look how our networks were able to respond to unprecedented change in usage, usage patterns, and carriers were able to adapt.

1063 And Cogeco testified yesterday on the issue of oversubscription ratio, where they said that's not an issue for us because we just don't let our networks get congested. So I think that there are not other service metrics that need to be mandated.

1064 As I said before, if in the future there's something that the market is telling carriers that consumers now care about, maybe because of technological evolution, we've seen that carriers will advertise that and display that, but that's just not the case today.

1065 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks very much. Appreciate it.

1066 THE CHAIRPERSON: Good. Thank you to CTA for engaging with the process and answering our questions today.

1067 We'd like to give you just a minute for a final thought if you have one.

1068 MR. SMITH: Yeah, no. Thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today.

1069 I won't do a recap of what I've already stated, other than to say that ‑‑ to repeat that based the parliamentary record and the testimony we heard yesterday, I think the real concern that people are expressing is that they continue to want to see the quality of rural services become closer to what's available in urban centres, and that is our industry along with government partners are focused on. And I think that is what they're looking for, not really looking for labels. Labels will not solve that problem.

1070 I also want to urge caution, you know, when it comes to some people may be inclined to dismiss the cost involved to implement something like this. And we've seen in other proceedings where people will say, oh, these are large companies, they can absorb the cost.

1071 Well, every single new regulatory mandate that's layered on is an incremental addition to the costs that are incurred. And as I said many times, diverts scarce and important resources away from important products and priorities that we share with the Commission and with Canadians.

1072 And therefore, I urge the Commission to recognize that people who suggest that, what could it hurt, or that I think somebody said yesterday, this won't cost carriers anything, that's just not true and that needs to be a big factor in any decision being made.

1073 And again, I thank you inviting me here today.

1074 THE SECRETARY: Thank you. We will take a break and be back at 10:05.

‑‑‑ Suspension à 9 h 49

‑‑‑ Reprise à 10 h 03

1075 THE SECRETARY: Thank you. We will now hear the presentation of TELUS.

1076 Please introduce yourself and your colleagues, and you may begin.

Présentation

1077 MR. SCHMIDT: Good morning, Vice‑Chair Scott, Commissioners and CRTC staff.

1078 I would like to start by acknowledging that we are gathered here today on the traditional, unsurrendered and unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin people, who have cared for and continue to care for this beautiful land and watershed that sustains all of us.

1079 My name is Stephen Schmidt. I am Vice‑President, Telecom Policy and Chief Regulatory Legal at TELUS.

1080 Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.

1081 Joining me on the panel today are my colleagues from TELUS: Tina Corrado, Director of Strategy and Planning; Jessica Riopel, Director of Marketing; Molly Samuelson, Director of Regulatory Affairs; David Peaker, Associate General Counsel, Regulatory; Dr. Jordan Melzer, Senior Engineer with our Chief Technology Office; Karen Cheung, Senior Regulatory Counsel; and Bill Abbott, Director of Regulatory Affairs.

1082 MR. PEAKER: We are here today because Parliament has directed specific incremental changes to the information that must be made available to the public by Canadian carriers that offer fixed broadband services.

1083 Parliament’s changes are for the purpose of allowing Canadians to make informed decisions when choosing fixed broadband services and to increase competition in the telecommunications industry.

1084 We agree that consumers should have access to transparent information to help them make informed purchasing decisions. To that end, we are here to help the Commission craft a policy that gives effect to the legislative objective.

1085 The Commission should:

1086 First, require disclosure of the most simple and relevant metrics, which are median speed, maximum plan speed as advertised, latency and technology type.

1087 Second, ensure that all consumers benefit by applying these requirements to all providers.

1088 Third, situate the required disclosures prominently in the pre‑sale context to give effect to the legislation’s focus on enabling consumers to make informed purchasing decisions.

1089 Fourth, give providers guidance on a standardized measurement methodology that can be efficiently adopted across all providers and plans.

1090 And fifth, oversee the application and interpretation of these rules directly and not delegate to the CCTS.

1091 MS. CORRADO: Since 2000 we have made generational investments in our networks, including wireless infrastructure and TELUS PureFibre infrastructure, which provides a 100 percent fibre connection, symmetrical upload and download speeds and low latency. These characteristics support a superior customer experience. Clear disclosures, comparable across providers, will help consumers understand the performance advantages of TELUS’ networks compared to our competitors.

1092 MS. RIOPEL: The three most important metrics are median speeds, maximum plan speeds as advertised and latency. Additionally, technology type should be disclosed, because consumers should clearly understand what kind of technology they are buying, whether it’s fibre, cable, fixed wireless or satellite. These choices will advance the intent of the legislation, which requires that information provided to the public be easily available, accessible and simple to understand, whereas mandating the inclusion of other metrics in the label, like pricing or over‑subscription ratios, frustrates the intent of the legislation.

1093 MS. SAMUELSON: All consumers are equally deserving of the Commission's protections. For this reason, the rules developed here should apply to all providers of fixed broadband service. To do otherwise will prevent consumers from making effective apples‑to‑apples comparisons.

1094 The Commission should refrain from copying and pasting another jurisdiction’s broadband disclosure framework onto Canada. The internet landscape in each jurisdiction is different, shaped by different rules, unique markets and consumer needs. For example, pricing disclosures might make more sense in the United States where the CRTC’s Internet Code does not exist. But in Canada, pricing is already extensively disclosed and robustly regulated under both the Telecommunications Act and the Competition Act.

1095 Any additional mandate would complicate the label, prevent effective communications between the provider and the consumer and add to implementation timeline and costs.

1096 DR. MELZER: As there are many ways to measure internet service performance, measurement standards are needed for transparency. Regardless of the testing tool used, standards can address basic aspects of testing, such as what metrics to test for and disclose, when and how often to test, how many services are to be tested and how tests are to be performed.

1097 This type of standardization is ideally suited to a CISC process. Through that process, the Commission can develop measurement standards that best implement its policy determinations.

1098 Should the Commission opt to address measurement methodology without CISC, then it should adopt the same flexibility given to providers in other jurisdictions.

1099 MR. PEAKER: The CRTC is best suited to oversee the implementation and interpretation of these new requirements. We have highlighted some of the complexities related to measuring internet service performance. The CCTS lacks the technical expertise and the mandate to interpret and apply this new disclosure framework. If the CRTC wishes to delegate any new authority to the CCTS, a broader review of the CCTS’s mandate is a condition precedent.

1100 MS. CORRADO: Implementation does not have to be slow, but reasonable timelines are necessary to get it right the first time. In addition to what we are discussing today, the Commission is conducting three other proceedings to address changes to the Telecommunications Act. Each will likely require changes to providers’ systems and platforms and should be taken into consideration when the Commission sets an implementation timeline.

1101 Faster implementation times are possible if the Commission stays focused on the incremental changes intended by Parliament. By establishing simple and relevant metrics and situating them in the pre‑sale context, the Commission can facilitate efficient and timely implementation.

1102 MR. SCHMIDT: We embrace this opportunity to enhance transparency for all consumers. Simple and relevant metrics should be situated in the pre‑sale context, and the measurement of speeds and latency should be standardized. This will ensure that all Canadians can make informed decisions when choosing a carrier for fixed broadband services.

1103 Thank you for your time today. We look forward to engaging with you on how to implement the legislation.

1104 THE CHAIRPERSON: Great. Thank you very much for being here in such numbers and yet still keeping your opening remarks under ten minutes. It’s appreciated.

1105 The engagement part will start with Commissioner Naidoo.

1106 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you so much for being here and for holding your concentration while that noise was going on. That’s not easy to compete with. So, we appreciate that.

1107 In your opening statement today, you support providing more information in a standardized format. And as you know ‑‑ you’ve probably been watching the hearing, you’ve probably read some of the submissions ‑‑ that’s in pretty stark contrast to some of the other providers who actually argue against that.

1108 So, I’m wondering why you take the view that you do.

1109 MR. PEAKER: Thank you very much for the question. I am happy to start that.

1110 I will say a couple of different things in response to that,

1111 First of all, the legislation has been amended. It is going to require new things once the CRTC brings it into effect. So, we want to engage constructively in the process and help you get there. We don’t think doing nothing is an option.

1112 Second of all, we are proud of our networks. We are proud of the services we provide to Canadians, and we think that transparency shows us well. It’s good for our consumers, and it would be good if all carriers had similar practices so the consumers could understand exactly what they’re getting and where the performance advantages lay.

1113 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: So you led me into the next question, because you probably saw that MP Mazier was here yesterday, and he said that ISPs should be, in his view, excited to show what they can offer consumers via a label.

1114 In his view, if people aren’t wanting to show what they can offer, that is cause for concern.

1115 So, I’m wondering what your thoughts are on his comments.

1116 MR. PEAKER: I might ask one of my colleagues to top up, but I will start by saying we are proud to show what we are doing, and we are doing that. We are happy to show the service quality that our consumers can expect from us.

1117 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Sorry, I was more interested in what do you say to ‑‑ what do you think about the fact that he thinks that ‑‑ so obviously, you do it. He thinks that anyone who doesn’t do it is cause for concern.

1118 What are your thoughts about other players who aren’t doing it? Do you share his view that it’s cause for concern?

1119 MR. PEAKER: I will say we are coming at it from a different perspective. We’re not Parliament. We’re not telling other carriers what to do. But we think consumers would benefit if there was a degree of standardization in the way carriers talk about their speed characteristics.

1120 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right, thank you for that.

1121 Yesterday Cogeco was here. They say consumers are already, in their view, being provided enough information, and they think that providing more information, especially via a label, would be costly.

1122 Do you agree with Cogeco that consumers have enough information? Let’s just start there. It’s a multi‑faceted question.

1123 MR. SCHMIDT: I can start. I mean, at a simple practical level, Parliament has directed the provision of some incremental information, and that’s a good idea to do that.

1124 But it’s also important to recognize that significant baseline of transparency that the Commission has already established through standardized contracts, critical information summaries, ITMP disclosure requirements, etc.

1125 So, the Commission has done a lot. There is some focus mandate to do more from the Commission, and we agree that it would be helpful.

1126 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right.

1127 Cogeco also said that it wasn't just a matter of cost, that they felt that too much information could be confusing for consumers. In essence, do you think there is a way to mitigate Cogeco’s concerns?

1128 MS. SAMUELSON: So TELUS’ proposal is to provide a focused set of metrics that I will touch on, and we mentioned those in our opening statement. That would be median speeds, maximum plan speeds as advertised, latency and technology type.

1129 These are the most simple and the most relevant metrics to consumers. Adding additional metrics that are not as relevant to consumers is going to overload the disclosure and, in some cases, lead to decision paralysis for consumers.

1130 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: You are saying that we have to be careful not to offer too much information, just the right amount. And in summary, would you state what points you think should be on there?

1131 MS. SAMUELSON: Yes, sure, I would be happy to expand.

1132 So, the legislation requires typical speeds measured at peak periods. In our view, median speed is the best representative of typical speeds. It’s the mid‑point.

1133 The average is perhaps not the best representation of typical. It’s going to include a full sample size, and there will be statistical outliers. So, consumers are familiar with the median.

1134 The maximum plan speeds is important and relevant to consumers. It’s going to represent the highest speeds obtained under ideal conditions. And when you have median and maximum together, that’s going to tell consumers quite a lot about the variability of the service. So, if you have a median that’s quite close to maximum, there’s not much variability. If it’s further apart, there is more variability.

1135 Third, latency, we do consider latency to be important and, more importantly, consumers. We’ve heard consumers talk about how latency is important to them, whether they are using video calling, gaming, video relay service. Latency is not hard to understand, and it’s an important metric.

1136 The last point is technology type. We’ve a seen a version of this in the U.K., and OfCom has indicated network type. We heard from MP Mazier yesterday that consumers are getting fixed wireless. Primarily, that seems to be where a lot of the problems are. So, we think consumers want to understand the technology that they are buying.

1137 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right, thank you.

1138 Sorry, I paused there. It looked like somebody else wanted to jump in. If I do clip anybody, please just put your hand up.

1139 The Internet Code, as you know, already requires clarity of offers and prices. However, saying that, some say that price and clarity can certainly be improved.

1140 What ways do you think that price and clarity can be improved?

1141 MR. PEAKER: Thank you. We think that pricing is already comprehensively regulated in Commission Regulations, in the broader legal construct in which we operate. We don’t think that we need to do anything further on pricing, and certainly in the context of this proceeding. Where we are focusing on providing important incremental information to consumers in the form of certain characteristics of performance of their network, it’s neither necessary nor desirable to add additional pricing requirements in this construct.

1142 MS. SAMUELSON: I might just add a couple of points onto that.

1143 Our view is including pricing in this label would actually subvert the intention of the legislation. It’s really about transparent service performance metric.

1144 Another point I will make is we’ve heard this morning that the FCC’s label, nutrition label, about half, the top half is various pricing elements. It’s not working. Consumers are finding it confusing, and providers are interpreting it differently.

1145 The last point I’ll point to is that CRTC public opinion research has indicated, as Mr. Schmidt mentioned this morning, a very small percentage, 1 percent of consumers, are finding price information hard to locate, hard to understand.

1146 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right, let's flesh that out. I wanted to dive down a bit more.

1147 So you cited that it's not working, and I’m wondering if there are ways to fix it. Are there ways that it can work?

1148 MS. RIOPEL: Maybe I will jump in and top up kind of related to the last question, as well.

1149 I think another important consideration here, kind of lending to the confusion point, is ISPs have differentiated pricing strategies, you know, offers and bundling discounts and whole home value that foster affordability, and they foster customer choice. Those are differentiated across ISPs.

1150 So to bring that together in a comparable manner, you can see how that would get quite complex.

1151 MR. PEAKER: I will just add one other point there, just on the point about the FCC.

1152 There is a very different legal and regulatory environment in Canada compared to what existed in the U.S. The FCC had its own reasons for adding things like pricing into their initial disclosure requirements.

1153 But here, you’ve already done that. There is already comprehensive and detailed regulations about how we present information to consumers at a pre‑sale and post‑sale point in time. So, it’s already kind of addressed.

1154 I think copying and pasting what the FCC had done and sort of sweeping away what the Commission has done before is neither necessary nor desirable, as I said earlier. And I think duplicating pricing disclosures with a label risks creating significant confusion between what we’re already doing and what we must do going forward after this is implemented.

1155 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right, thank you for that.

1156 Let's talk a bit about clarity on contract length. The Internet Code, as you know, it precludes changes to pricing during the contract term. However, it does require ISPs to notify consumers about price changes after the contract period concludes.

1157 It also requires that time limited discounts be explained in the offer and contract. However, internet customers still raise concerns over a lack of clarity of contract lengths and price certainty.

1158 So, how do you think that the Commission should require ISPs to improve the clarity of contract periods to consumers?

1159 MR. PEAKER: I will have maybe a couple of aspects to that.

1160 First of all, this is one of multiple consultations the Commission is currently running to deal with multiple changes to the Telecommunications Act. In those other proceedings, end of contract notifications is in front of the Commission. So, we know this is something you are looking at and indeed have to look at because of what Parliament has asked you to do. So, this is already going on.

1161 And of course, more generally, the Internet Code, and in other contexts there’s other CRTC codes that apply to different parts of our business, those are comprehensive detailed pieces of regulation that address many, many different things all at once, and they are developed through a robust multi‑party engagement process, right?

1162 They can and should be reviewed every so often, and if things aren’t working, they should be amended. But it should be amended in a way that sort of comprehensively addresses the full surroundings of those regulatory policies and not just one at a time, and not in the context of a speed labelling proceeding.

1163 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right, thank you. The Commission, as you know, has identified congestion as a notable cause of subscriber complaints with the oversubscription ratio explained in the exhibit, which we provided, being one way to describe congestion.

1164 I’m wondering how you manage congestion for your customers?

1165 DR. MELZER: Thank you very much. First of all, we manage the offers that we give. So we do address‑based qualification, we don’t look at the neighbourhood or the Tier 5 region, we need the customer’s address. And once we have that, we can determine what networks we have that serve the customers and what plans on them we can stand behind.

1166 In order to increase the offers that we have, we invest in our infrastructure, we invest in our technology, we invest in our ability to serve. And in order to support that investment, we do measurement and testing within our network, and those show us, you know, where ‑‑ those guide that investment, you know, what ‑‑ the trends and utilization, that sort of thing.

1167 So those are the three approaches that we use to manage congestion.

1168 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right. And so this hearing is heavy on transparency. So I’m wondering how you would explain, or are you able to explain the metric that you use to your customers?

1169 DR. MELZER: The metric of congestion or metric of how we choose our investment decisions? So is that your question?

1170 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Yes. Basically, how would you explain it? Can you put it into layman’s terms?

1171 DR. MELZER: Sure, okay.

1172 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: In easily understandable chunks for grassroots ‑‑

1173 DR. MELZER: Perhaps I’ll try this one more time. We try not to promise a customer a service we can’t deliver. And when we want to deliver faster, better, more services, we start by making the technology investments that allow them.

1174 And to understand if we’re doing that, we have to test and we have to look at, you know, utilization throughout the network in order to understand when we built enough network in order to serve.

1175 So it’s a constant investment in order to be able to serve more customers or provide higher speed plans.

1176 MR. PEAKER: Maybe if I could just top up, and I don't mean to anticipate a question that might be coming next. But in terms of congestion, like the issue that’s important for customers is the speeds they’re getting and how consistent those speeds are.

1177 In our view, that is addressed by providing median speeds, like the metrics that we’ve proposed in this proceeding will provide that information to consumers.

1178 Congestion in and of itself is something that affects speeds, but that switch should be measured to ensure that customers can actually get what they’re doing. So something like an oversubscription ratio doesn’t add any information that would help a consumer understand what service they’re going to get, and would actually sort of confuse consumers as to what they’re getting.

1179 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Okay. Do you monitor congestion and, if so, how often do you monitor it? And could you explain to consumers how you do that and what you do, in an understandable way?

1180 DR. MELZER: So we have two kinds of measurement that we do. So we do active measurement, we have ‑‑ within the equipment that we give to consumers we do have measurement probes. So we can run and we do run tests sometimes within the home, sometimes from the home on the access. But we’re able to see the results of measurements that we’ve initiated.

1181 We also do passive measurement. So we can look at each link and see basically how idle is it, you know, are there problems, is there, you know, traffic building up on one end of it. And those are things that, you know, when we look at trends inside those we’re able to see, you know, where we think there’s going to be a need to invest.

1182 And so it’s both that passive sort of measurement as well as a range of active testing that allows us to make sure that we’re building a good network.

1183 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right, thanks for that. Let's move to speeds now. One of the ways to help consumers figure out the speeds that they really need is to include information on what sort of activities a certain speed can actually support.

1184 Currently, ISPs provide this type of contextualizing information in different ways, but not in a single comparable way. And so, you know, like different services like streaming services, for example, actually tell users what minimum speed is necessary to use that service.

1185 So would it make sense to require ISPs to disclose something like the maximum number of users for key services, like something like that?

1186 MR. SCHMIDT: I’ll start the answer, and my colleagues may wish to add to it. I think it makes most institutional sense for the Commission to be in the educational business, in the sense that you have the trust, the national reach, and the expertise to do this. And I think you should be doing that, and we should be building and operating networks.

1187 Secondly, I think this information is highly perishable, whether it’s about ‑‑ and the Vice‑Chair might have said, the number of minutes it takes to download whatever, and it changes rapidly over time. And I question the kind of time utility of this and I wouldn’t want to burden the label with it, label or whatever construct.

1188 So, yes, to educating people, absolutely. I think the Commission’s better positioned to do it. We are better positioned to run networks for you and disclose the crucial metrics that Parliament wants disclosed.

1189 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Okay. The concept of taking measurements to hold ISPs to account has been one of the key solutions proposed to solve that particular problem. However, ISPs have argued that there are significant practical challenges to implementing a thorough measurement regime.

1190 So I’m wondering what level of measurements are required, in your view, so that any reported metrics are useful for consumers?

1191 MR. PEAKER: So part of what we’ve suggested in this proceeding is that once the Commission decides on the metrics that should be displayed, it would be really good to have a CISC process to help standardize the ways that ISPs can measure it.

1192 And part of what we would foresee and part of what we have advocated throughout this proceeding is that there be a bit of a scalable process to measuring so that it works for, you know, plans with a low number of customers, it works for new plans, it works for small ISPs, it works for large ISPs, and these things can kind of scale.

1193 There’s no doubt that, you know, testing can be an expensive endeavour and we don’t think it should be ‑‑ it doesn’t need to be made that way uniformly in a way that would detract from the ability to provide standardized disclosures. The testing itself can be made scalable.

1194 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Okay. So if consumers wanted to know like the typical speeds of internet services in their neighbourhood, what would be the minimum geographic area, for example, the frequency of testing? Do you have any thoughts on those things?

1195 MR. PEAKER: I’ll start with geographic area. We don’t think that labels that are specific to geographic areas are necessary. It would certainly add to the compliance burden, but they also would provide very little extra information for most consumers.

1196 We heard yesterday some of the complaints or concerns that led Parliament to going down this road. And a lot of it seemed to be driven by certain technologies; so fixed wireless or satellite services. Different types of services are provided in different areas and can have very different performance characteristics.

1197 A fibre‑to‑the‑home connection functions differently than a fixed wireless connection, and functions differently than a satellite connection, and they may have different degrees of expectation and variability and so on and so forth.

1198 So, with that in mind, we have argued that the disclosure should include technology type, right? And so having that information will allow consumers to much better understand.

1199 So the concerns about well, you know, the really fast network in the city sort of skewing the results for a slower or less reliable network in a rural area really don’t exist if what’s being disclosed in the rural area is about the technology, which is there. And fixed wireless, satellite, these are mostly used in rural areas. And so once you include technology type, it significantly ameliorates that concern.

1200 The other part, and it’s sort of Part 2 of geography, even if you did drill down, in many cases it would be irrelevant. You know, our pure fibre network is going to function essentially the same everywhere, right? It’s not going to be that variable.

1201 So adding complexity to the label on how you do it doesn’t provide any additional information to those consumers. But also what’s most important is the service that the individual consumer is going to get, right?

1202 And even at a very narrow geographic range, say for a fixed wireless service, you could go to a small geographic area, but different consumers in that area may in fact get much different service compared to what is actually measured at an average level there, right? There’s things like whether you get a good signal at that location.

1203 And so it really does need to be with the service providers to make sure that they are capable of delivering the service that they’re telling consumers that they can expect, which is the way we do it. And my colleague, Jordan, sort of described that earlier, there’s a qualification process. We have to make sure that we can actually deliver the service we’re saying.

1204 So that is the better answer. That gets each consumer with a proper understanding of what they’re going to get.

1205 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you so much for that fulsome answer. Those are all my questions, but I know my colleagues have some for you as well. Thank you.

1206 THE CHAIRPERSON: Sorry, and I promised Commission Paquette that she would be next. And then I’m going to use the Chair’s prerogative to jump in, because it is following up on Commissioner Naidoo’s questions, because I heard your statement about not wanting to offer Canadians a service that you can’t stand behind.

1207 So a two‑part question. One, I’d like to know what happens when that isn’t met, right? So when you thought you could stand behind a product, the product you weren’t able to deliver, how do you treat your consumer in that case, and is there a role for the regulator there?

1208 I also want to get back to this notion of the get‑out‑of‑jail‑free card. Because there’s always either the phrase “up to” or there’s a footnote saying, you know, there could be conditions that we can’t be held accountable for. So how does a consumer really feel that you are standing behind, and what happens if you fail on that objective?

1209 MR. SCHMIDT: I will start the answer, and I’m happy for my colleagues to add. And the Vic‑Chair violated my promise to my witnesses that there would be no multi‑part questions from the Panel.

1210 But maybe starting with the “up to” kind of competition law construct, because that’s an important question. So we’re providing services in a space of sort of interlocking legislation, the Radio Communications Act, Competition Act, Telecommunications Act. So I think to be able to advertise meaningly across a footprint of millions or tens of millions of customers you end up having to use the “up to” construct in ads and stuff, that’s practical.

1211 But that is certainly not going to stop you from providing greater specificity flowing out of this proceeding, we wholeheartedly agree. So the “up to” is going to be there for practical and legal purposes in advertising.

1212 But we can certainly provide more granular information and transparency to customers flowing out of this process, and we have ways of doing that by reporting by technology, by qualifying right down to the house, you know, by postal code, et cetera. so we can get there. And, in the practical sense, we’re doing a lot of this now already.

1213 MS. RIOPEL: Yes, for sure. Like, we’ve actually moved away from using “up to” speeds for our fibre customers, which is the vast majority of our internet sales today. And the reason that we did that is it’s more clear for customers, first of all. Second of all, the speeds that we are delivering were at or exceeding in all instances, so we have made that pivot to a more simplified manner.

1214 We do have, you know, legal disclaimers that, you know, your actual speed experience is subject to Wi‑Fi within your home, the device, all of the uncontrollables. But that’s really Telus’s commitment to say, hey, we qualified you for this pure fibre plan, and we are 100 per cent certain that that’s the experience that we can deliver.

1215 MR. SCHMIDT: You asked a multi‑part question despite my promise to my business witnesses that no one would do that, so I’m going to give you a multi‑part answer.

1216 So the second part you impliedly or actually asked about, how would you enforce? That’s a good question. And I think these will be, you know, depending what flows out of this proceeding, one set of, you know, dozens of transparency measures and obligations that apply to the offering and provision of broadband service.

1217 They should be monitored and enforced in a comparable manner the way you would with ITMPs or the way you would with other obligations under the Act, you know, annual reporting, complaints, follow‑up, you know, redirect thus the changed behaviour if it’s not working. You know, I actually think it’ll workout, but it doesn’t need a standalone enforcement process. It would be strange in fact to say, well, for the internet code we’re doing this, for ITMP we’re doing this.

1218 But, no, just integrate it into the Act, it’s one more measure that attaches to the provision of service, and enforce it using all your existing tools.

1219 MS. RIOPEL: I’ll just top‑up on the education part. Like, from a marketing perspective, which is my role on this panel, we invest heavily in educating customers on metrics and how they could evaluate different service offerings, because that’s where we’ve invested is our competitive advantage.

1220 You know, as my colleague mentioned, very supportive of the CRTC supporting and publishing standard definitions that can be used across providers. But we don’t believe that our practices in how we do that, and how we educate our customers needs to be regulated, whereas a standard external process could support.

1221 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much. With apologies, Commissioner Paquette, I’ll now turn it over to you.

1222 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Mr. Vice‑Chair, you stole some of my questions.

1223 I’d like to come back to some very basic questions based on the intervention of Mr. Mazier yesterday who said that any requirements to produce standardized information should not be costful for the ISPs, because you already have the information in hand.

1224 So I guess my first question is, is it true that, you know, all the key information about the performance of your network, like of course speed, uploads, downloads, but also latency, jitter, is it true that you all have this in hand even for regional key measurement purposes?

1225 Second question is, if so, is it easy to include in the description of your offer, or is there a level where it becomes difficult, you know, a level of requirements where it becomes difficult?

1226 MR. PEAKER: Thank you for that question. I’ll respond in a couple of different ways. The first is to say that, you know, while we don't agree that compliance with any legal or regulatory obligation is likely ever to be free, I mean it would be great if that were true, it’s almost always going to have some cost to it.

1227 But I think it was relevant to the amendments that were passed by Parliament that the introducer of the bill thinks that this should not be an onerous, super complicated implementation process. We shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel or creating new things, or doing extraneous things to overburden the implementation process. Like, realistically, this doesn’t need to be a very expensive difficult process.

1228 So you’ve heard from my colleagues. We certainly do measure our network. We certainly do have information. And we certainly do already, in our view, disclose to our customers most of what we’re proposing should be made standard.

1229 So that’s a long answer, I appreciate. But it really depends on what the Commission comes out with in this decision, right? Something that meets the needs of Parliament, what they’ve asked, the specific incremental changes to the disclosure requirements. Yes, we think that could be done in quite an efficient way.

1230 It is also possible, with many of the other proposals we’ve seen on the record, to make this quite burdensome, right, and we’d advocate that you don’t make it so burdensome.

1231 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: As an example regarding the speed, Cogeco mentioned yesterday that they were delivering the same level of speed through all their networks, and this is not a challenge for them to measure the speed.

1232 Are you in the same situation? Is it as easy as they say?

1233 DR. MELZER: Thank you. We don't offer the same plans everywhere. We have a range of different kinds of networks and technology generations, they don’t all do the same thing. So we offer services where they’re available as we invest, but we can’t offer, you know, the highest speed plan to everybody.

1234 I’m not sure how they do it, but that’s a question for them, not for us.

1235 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Okay. If, as an example, we would require ‑‑ well, you suggested that latency should be included in the requirement, that you would be ready to provide this information for the customers.

1236 Would you be able to measure, let’s say a customer doesn’t feel he has what he sees in the offer, would there be a way to verify the level of latency that is provided to the customer?

1237 DR. MELZER: Thank you very much. We host two different kinds of speed testing infrastructure. One is used internally for sort of what we think of as engineering purposes to make sure the network is good. And then the other one is to allow for exactly the kind of test that you’re suggesting.

1238 So when a technician goes to a house when they’re doing an installation they do have guidance to validate that installation by doing a third‑party style of speed test. So the Ookla speed test on that stuff. And we have a speed test server, as do most ISPs, within our infrastructure.

1239 So, you know, the technician can do that and make sure it’s done right, and show the customer how to do it. And if the customer is, you know, can then ‑‑ like, they can learn how to do that themselves if they feel they want to do it over and over again.

1240 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: So it would be easy to measure for the customers with the tools that you provide?

1241 DR. MELZER: So with that test infrastructure we provide, there is a way for them to do it. The caution is that if you just go ‑‑ I don’t have my phone on me, but if you sort of do that test from like anywhere in your house, you know, you’re on Wi‑Fi in your garage or something, you’re not going to show the full capability of that service.

1242 So if you want to do it, if you have a very high‑speed service and you want to test it well, you have to be set‑up properly. But, for sure, there are tools for the customer to do it, and there’s the tools that we use to do it as well.

1243 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: On your side too. And there would be a way to go back, if there’s a complaint, and look at what was the latency at the time?

1244 DR. MELZER: They can take the link from it, and if they do a test there’s a way to snapshot what they saw, and we can see that in the data later on.

1245 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Would you say the same thing for the jitter performance data?

1246 DR. MELZER: So the Ookla.net speed test system has a number of different things that it does. I’m not going to ‑‑ I mean, I don’t really want to focus on jitter in particular, but it does have latency measures and it has speed measures. So that’s available, you know, to customers. We do a number of internal tests that we just use for fixing the network.

1247 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Okay. One question that I think you answered. You suggest that the technological type of network be included in the requirements. You really think that for the customer this would make a difference, and we should ask the customers to understand that if they are on a fibre network versus a satellite network they should understand that there’s a difference?

1248 MR. PEAKER: That’s a very good question. I’ll answer it in two parts, as I am often doing with these answers.

1249 So the first is many consumers will know and care, right, especially those in areas where maybe they’ve only had fixed wireless or satellite they’ll often be very happy if they’re able to get fibre or something else. So it certainly is relevant.

1250 If you’ve had an experience with a technology and you weren’t happy with that experience, it’s really good to know what experience you’re going to be getting with your new provider, when you’re looking around for new plans. So, that’s the first part.

1251 And the second part is, part of the reason for introducing that is to ensure that you’re not providing performance information about other networks that you’re running. My colleague talked about, you know, we have different networks and we run them in different ways, and different plans are available on those. And so, obviously we shouldn’t be providing performance information about a super‑fast plan that that customer isn't able to get. And so, adding technology is one of the ways to make sure that what’s being displayed is actually what will be delivered at that location.

1252 MS. SAMUELSON: I have one just small top‑up which is, I think it’s really helpful for consumers, especially to prevent any kind of misunderstanding that no, in fact, you’re not getting a full fibre service; you’re getting a partial, part‑fibre service, or in fact you’re getting a cable service, you’re getting fixed wireless. It’s going to be very clear for them.

1253 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Okay.

1254 MS. RIOPEL: I think it becomes even more important based on some of the market dynamics that we’re seeing. We’re seeing competitors lead with their wireless internet, offering as like a low entry price point. So, that should not be perceived by a customer as like an equal to their wired network, and I think we should be extra transparent to customers on what technology they’re getting.

1255 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Okay.

1256 And maybe my last question. I would like to hear you more on the burden that would represent the requirement of producing a label for every one of your offers. Can you give us an idea of what it represents in terms of development, but also of impact on ‑‑ I’m sure you have a pipeline right now; you have a development plan. Are there some projects that would vehicle to be set aside to produce this label?

1257 MR. PEAKER: Okay, great. I will start and if anybody wants to top up, feel free. It is hard for us to speak in terms of concrete impact when there are so many options on the table. So, we have proposed something that we think fully meets the objective of Parliament and what the Commission should be adopting, in a way that we think is efficient. We’re also aware though ‑‑ and I mentioned this earlier ‑‑ we’re dealing with three other, interrelated proceedings, amongst other things, each of which is likely to have some sort of cost and time and resource sort of intensivity to it.

1258 So, until we see sort of the full scope of all the things we’re going to be required to do in the next, foreseeable future, it would be sort of premature for us to understand exactly what the cost is. But the bigger picture is that there are ways of doing this, and indeed, the other proceedings are going on, that are efficient and effective that meet the objectives of the amendments to the Act, that continue to meet the policy objectives of the Act and indeed the policy direction that’s been provided to the CRTC, and there’s a way of doing all these things efficiently and effectively, and we’ve advocated for that.

1259 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: No more questions.

1260 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.

1261 We will go to Commissioner Desmond next, please.

1262 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Good morning. I have just a couple of questions. I think one of the things we hope to accomplish from this proceeding is to make information comparable across service providers so that the consumer can decide which best their needs, and trying to make that information standardized and that people can then choose what’s best for them.

1263 I was interested to hear your comments that pricing would not be a metric that you would include in that standardized information, and I think one of your colleagues said that pricing is differentiated across providers, and that’s flexibility that maybe providers need. Yesterday, I think we heard from a group in Manitoba that talked about, for consumers, two of the most important pieces are reliability and pricing.

1264 So, I’m just curious if you could maybe speak a little bit further as to why pricing would not be something that should be included in the standardized information, if we’re trying to make it easy for consumers to compare across plans.

1265 MS. SAMUELSON: I would refer back. So, we agree it is important for consumers, absolutely. Unlike the United States, where it’s not really available except on the label, here it’s there. It’s on the website. It’s required to be clear in offers and contracts, through the Internet Code, and we’ve mentioned that. So, the complexity I think that my colleague was referring to is the changing, dynamic nature of pricing. You know, if it was sort of frozen in time, stuck in a label, it restricts our ability to be nimble with our pricing offers, and competitive. That’s where I would start.

1266 MS. RIOPEL: And maybe just to supplement. It is not that pricing is not important; it’s critically important. You can’t really sell anything without the price tag, of course, so we are communicating that, and the Commission’s public research, as cited this morning, showed that customers aren’t confused by current practices. So, it’s kind of saying the existing legislation that we have in place is working, largely.

1267 I think my point was more around when you start to do that in a really comparable manner and start to make it really rigid, that’s where complexity could come in. So, my perspective is more, you know, let the current system continue to work without mandating it into the label.

1268 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay. And then, maybe just a second question.

1269 You spoke earlier today about standardized measurement and taking a scalable approach, but earlier today we heard from the CTA and how different providers maybe measure differently. So, I’m just wondering if you could provide a bit more detail as to what your thinking is around a scalable approach, and how do we permit the flexibility to allow providers to test in their own way?

1270 DR. MELZER: Thank you. So, we propose that the Commission first decide on the what ‑‑ you know, what should be tested, what the outcomes should be ‑‑ and then go to CISC to help make sure that the testing methodologies that are going to be used produce those outcomes in a way that is comparable.

1271 So, we believe that people can bring their own tools, as long as they validate them through CISC to make sure that they’re going to produce a comparable result. That’s what’s important ‑‑ that you have evidence that the tools are showing you what you want to see. It’s unnecessary to specify to the ISP how they meet that; you just have to validate it. And basically, CISC can help to work through all those implementation details.

1272 MR. PEAKER: Just to top off quickly. Yes, we expect different ISPs will use different tools, different commercially available testing methodologies, or develop their own, et cetera. What CISC can do is help measure things ‑‑ or determine things like, well, how often to test; how to scale it when there’s only a small number of subscribers on a given plan; when you’re introducing a new plan, what’s the threshold at which you should testing in some broader way; what time of day should you test that; and other things like that.

1273 So, it’s not about the tool. It’s not about whether it’s this company or this speed test, or that. We expect there will continue to be variety in the usage of tools, but there is certainly room for standardization in how they’re used and how often they’re used.

1274 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay, thank you.

1275 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thanks.

1276 We will go to Commissioner Abramson next, please.

1277 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you. And thank you for bringing a well‑sized team here today.

1278 There are a couple of areas I would want to try and mop up. Let me start with pricing, and you’ve referred to some of the differences between the U.S. and Canada in terms of the role that the nutrition label plays in the U.S. in providing pricing transparency, which hopefully is achieved through the Internet Code’s requirements, including the critical information summary obligation.

1279 I’ve been asking some of the folks before us about making the critical information summary, and I suppose by extension the whole contract, persistently available, to borrow a term from the DWCC, who was up the other day. They argued that, for information that is critical to their subscription or to their members’ subscription to be useful, it ought to be persistently average.

1280 That’s not something that’s currently required in the Internet Code. I believe the requirement currently is that it be made available on demand without much more. Would that be an onerous‑over‑time thing to implement? And I suppose what I am asking about is making the critical information summary available in the portal, if it’s not already, to a subscriber.

1281 MS. SAMUELSON: I might just need a little clarification on the question, if that’s okay. Are you asking if there are concerns or challenges to making the CIS critical information summary available in a portal, specifically?

1282 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Yes. I suppose I am assuming that subscribers to Telus have a customer account portal that they can go to and look at their bill and usage and so on. And so yes, that’s what I’m asking about.

1283 MR. SCHMIDT: Yes, we’re struggling a little bit with the question but let’s go to the factual baseline of what we do in the real world right now, and that might get us part way ‑‑ or what we could do.

1284 MS. CORRADO: Thank you for the question. So, today, the critical information summary is included with the customer service agreement which, upon a customer taking on a service term, an email is sent and the critical information summary is attached along with the service agreement in that email. So, it is a point in time with that transaction ‑‑ transactional.

1285 So, in order for us to consider the introduction of ‑‑ if I’m understanding this correctly ‑‑ a critical information summary that is in a live portal and is available to the customer at any given time in that service term, we’d need to take that back because that would likely involve a systems implementation, and that would require planning and an estimate to understand what that would involve. We’ve never considered that today, so we don’t ‑‑ I can’t really tell you that.

1286 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: We would be glad if you would undertake to get us a response later on.

1287 MR. SCHMIDT: We do so undertake.

1288 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you.

1289 Let me now go to the more service quality type issues that we have been spending some time on. We have heard different views on whether there ought to be a single peak period defined for everyone, or whether ISPs ought to be able to come up with their own peak period based on the continuous four‑hour period with the most residential traffic.

1290 What is Telus’ view? And obviously, this gets into questions of regionality as well.

1291 MR. PEAKER: I think we would like to see this sort of thing debated once we have a full set of metrics. I don’t mean to repeat myself, but I do think this could benefit from discussion once we have a full set of metrics that we know we’re going to have to report on.

1292 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: If we were to have to make a decision one way or the other, which way would you prefer that we go?

1293 MR. PEAKER: Well, I think you should come up with a single hour and not try to do it on a regional basis. I mean, we have said at other points of our testimony today and throughout our interventions that geographical‑based labels are not necessary and desirable, and we don’t think we should do that.

1294 We’ve seen examples obviously from international regulators, and Australia is one example where they simply picked a time, and that’s how you measure the peak period that you’re looking for.

1295 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you. Let me now ‑‑ and that is helpful. I am trying to get a good range of views on this on the record. Latency but not jitter and packet loss, of the metrics that we set out in our 2016 and then 2018 and 2019 decisions. Can you walk us through your thinking a little bit?

1296 MR. PEAKER: I am going to start and then I am going to ask my colleague, Jordan, to top up.

1297 So, yes, we looked carefully at the legislation and then at the CRTCS’s TNC, and gave thought to, well, which of these performance characteristics are most important to consumers at the moment of when they’re buying, right, which is the purpose of the legislative amendments. And so, we acknowledge that there are other contexts where different network information might be useful for different purposes.

1298 So, if you’re defining what qualifies as meeting the basic service, if you’re looking to subsidize a network build, certainly that’s a critical piece of information. There’s lot of information that the CRTC or another funding agency should be looking at from a technical perspective that is totally relevant in that context ‑‑ and a lot less relevant to a consumer who is trying to choose between ISPs.

1299 But as to how these different metrics would be perceived by our consumers, I can pass it to Jordan and others if they want to top up.

1300 DR. MELZER: Thank you. So, I guess to address jitter first. So, jitter is a latency statistic. It’s the variance in latency, and I think reporting it separately rather than linking it to an absolute reporting, like removing the mean and then showing this different number for jitter, is more confusing than reporting latency more robustly. I guess in public speed testing, usually there is both unloaded and loaded latency metrics that are used.

1301 So, I guess to explain, they take a latency measure when there is no other traffic going, and that’s sort of a best case latency. And they do a latency traffic concurrent with the speed test ‑‑ so, while the network is loaded, and usually that’s worse. Right? And so, reporting those numbers gives you this range that represents what to expect, and they showcase that rather than showcasing jitter, which is a lot less meaningful. So, that’s the ‘why not jitter?’.

1302 And in terms of packet loss, I believe in the Measuring Broadband 2020 report, you sort of discuss there, sort of packet loss is impactful of it’s very high. If it’s very low, it doesn’t matter that much how low it goes. And so, because it’s more of a threshold effect, it’s sort of less meaningful. Also, if there is very high packet loss, you’re going to see that show up, for example, in speed. So, ...

1303 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: So packet loss is almost more like congestion than like some of the other measures in that you just try not to have it, but the metric is less significant.

1304 DR. MELZER: Internally, like, it shows up there is trouble, and it shows us room for improvement. But I think it’s harder to surface to the public.

1305 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Understood. Earlier you talked about passive and active measurement. I’d like to ask you more about the passive measurement that you undertake as part of monitoring your network, to ensure a high‑quality experience for end‑users.

1306 I assume this is something done routinely and as part of regular network operations?

1307 DR. MELZER: I think most ISPs look at link utilization and they sort of see how much is their network used, what’s hot, what’s trending. So, we do extensive telemetry. If it’s powered on, it’s reporting information back. And if we have high levels or increasing levels, or novelties, fluctuation ‑‑ that’s something that will trigger more investigation, and if there’s a need, ultimately more investment.

1308 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: So, would you know at a fairly granular level ‑‑ in fact, would a lot of the work really be the aggregation of those granular levels, up? The nature of the speeds, and packet loss, and jitter, and latency of most of your users at any given time, based on the actual traffic that’s being generated?

1309 DR. MELZER: So ‑‑ okay. So, the question ‑‑ I think, if I understand, the question is, through passive measurement, how much can we understand? And so, it’s easier to see how the link is doing than how the customer service is doing, through passive measurement. Even if you did fairly advanced passive measurement ‑‑ and we have some of that, where we’re tracking this particular user ‑‑ the user doesn’t necessarily use an application on a daily basis, or consistently, that that goes up to full speed. And so, we may not be able to see what that full speed or stressed experience is like.

1310 And to be honest, we’re a little bit nervous about over‑measuring that because it might impact customers, right? But, so, what we see ‑‑ that isn't what gives us ‑‑ the reason why we have separate active tooling is to try to get that custom review, and both of them are useful.

1311 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: In generating the kind of metrics that we’re talking about today, would you rely more on passive measurement?

1312 DR. MELZER: I think it depends on what gets included, but it sounds like you are going to require something that will require active measurement. It would be amazing if everything was achievable through passive means, and certainly going through CISC is something that, if there’s a really creative solution that’s found there that satisfies everything, that would be great.

1313 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: To the extent that we can be clear without having to order follow‑up processes, that’s probably a good thing.

1314 What would be possible, relying only on passive measurement, that’s in the nature of what we’ve been talking about here today?

1315 DR. MELZER: Okay. So, I am not sure that I am comfortable answering what is possible with the existing tooling. It is possible to get measurements of latency that just take advantage of existing back‑and‑forth inside the traffic. They might not be quite as accurate. It’s more challenging, I think, to get a full speed test through passive measurement.

1316 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you. And then, yes, I suppose my last question. I know we are a little bit over time, and just to finish out with this round of clarifications, which are very helpful ‑‑ so, thank you.

1317 You have proposed an approach in your submissions. How much more work from CISC do you think is required if we were to theoretically ‑‑ and I certainly am not saying we will ‑‑ and I’ll be asking this to others who have made concrete proposals as well, but, you know, if we were to simply adopt your proposal, if we were to use our existing 2018 and 2019 guidance as a gap filler, how much is really required in terms of further clarification that would create something reasonably comparable, in the way that, you know, the FCC has created a loose standard, and the Australians and the British as well? In other words, how do we get out of having to go to CISC?

1318 MR. PEAKER: Well, I mean, obviously our position is we should go to CISC, so, I don’t want to say how to get out of it. But certainly, like, so, to begin with, the Commission, before it sends anything to CISC, should obviously be very clear about what it’s doing. Like, it should not be a long or contentious process. Like, if you’ve given a handful of clear metrics that are to be measured, and how they’re to be reported, it’s really just sort of finalizing on the details of how to do the measurement.

1319 So, like, other parties may suggest some larger role for CISC. We’re not suggesting that. We’re suggesting that the vast majority ‑‑ and indeed, as it must be, all of the policy determinations should be made by the Commission, and that those policy decisions should be fairly ‑‑ indeed very clear as to what is being done. So, we don’t envision a lengthy process.

1320 But the second part is, yes, if the Commission wishes to avoid going to CISC, then it would provide, in our view, a looser standard such as what the FCC has done or what the Australian regulators have done. I mean, that’s certainly a possibility. We think there is an opportunity for greater standardization, to build a little bit on the international examples, if you do use the tools we have, which is CISC; right? It’s a great tool. It accomplishes a lot of things. The Commission certainly doesn’t have to take it; there are other ways of doing it, and it would just be a slightly looser standard for ISPs, as you say.

1321 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you, and thank you for all this additional detail which, as I say, has been very helpful for us.

1322 So, I’ll throw it back to you, Vice‑Chairman Scott.

1323 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.

1324 So you did commit to an undertaking during that. I’ve got a procedural preference, that we issue that to you as a written RFI.

1325 MR. SCHMIDT: That’s awesome, because we often have a bet about, can we get off the stand with no undertakings, and then I thought I had lost, but now I’ve won, so that's fine.

‑‑‑ Rires

1326 THE CHAIRPERSON: Congratulations.

1327 Given that I expect we may have other RFIs as well, you’ll be stuck with a common deadline for all of our questions and no undertaking as per the ‑‑ your pool.

1328 MR. SCHMIDT: Perfect.

1329 THE CHAIRPERSON: And with that, I will thank you as an entire group for your intervention both in writing and before us today, and we’ll turn it over to you for a quick final thought to leave us with.

1330 MR. SCHMIDT: Super quick. A couple of points of thanks and one point of substance.

1331 So thanks, first off, for your patience with our complete answers. I know it’s a long day, you’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so thank you for your patience.

1332 Thank you for being welcoming, particularly to first‑time business unit witnesses. I promised that, you know, this would be way better than watching the Oilers, and I think it has been. And so thank you for being welcoming because it ‑‑ to make it a safe place for folks to come and testify so they might even come back.

1333 And thanks in a more macro sense for the actual opportunity to dialogue live. It’s super meaningful to us. I think it enhances ‑‑ it raises our game to be before you. It raises our game to hear other people live and I think it trickles through into the record and in the decision, ultimately, so that’s great.

1334 And my last and final point of substance, I hope we’ve come across as constructive. We want to support you. You have the mandate to do something. We want you to go do it, you know, in a focused way and with due recognition that you have a number of tools out there that work, the Internet Code, the Critical Information Summary, the ITMP. We don’t need to reproduce those or sweep them away, but you have a mandate to do something here that I think will be genuinely helpful for customers if implemented with the right footprint, so thank you.

1335 THE SECRETARY: Thank you.

1336 I will now ask Bell Canada to come to the presentation table.

Présentation

1337 MR. GRAHAM: Thank you. Thank you, Vice‑Chair, Commissioners and staff for the opportunity to appear before you today on behalf of Bell Canada.

1338 My name is Mark Graham. I’m Senior Vice President, Legal and Regulatory. To my right is Melissa Dufour, Director, Devices and Best Network, and to my left is Phil Gauvin, Assistant General Counsel, Regulatory.

1339 At Bell, our purpose is to advance how Canadians connect with each other and the world. We execute on this vision through four key pillars: putting customers first; offering Canada's fastest pure fibre Internet and 5G networks; becoming a tech services leader, and building a digital media and content powerhouse. For purposes of today's hearing, let me say a little more about the first two of these.

1340 We are putting customers first as our top priority. Earlier this year, we named a Chief Customer Experience Officer whose work is grounded in four key commitments to our customers: your time matters; we keep our promises; we make it intuitively easy, and One Bell experience.

1341 The next priority is to provide the best internet and wireless networks and services. We've made significant investments in fibre and 5G and our networks continue to receive third party recognition for delivering the fastest download and upload speeds and lowest latency. In particular, we believe in the power of fibre and the benefits it delivers to customers and to the country. Fibre is clearly the superior technology and customers know it.

1342 So we share the goals of making it easy for customers to shop for their internet service and delivering on their expectations for the services they buy. The question for the Commission in this hearing is whether, and to what extent, regulatory intervention is needed to achieve those goals.

1343 As Phil and Melissa will explain in more detail, the evidence before the Commission is clear. Canadians are already well informed and able to compare providers.

1344 Regulatory constructs that prescribe detailed testing methodologies, new service quality metrics or the precise format for how information is presented to consumers are interesting objects of study but would be very costly to implement, confusing for customers, and have no demonstrated benefits. And most importantly, at least in the case of Bell, we are already delivering the services our customers expect.

1345 Phil.

1346 MR. GAUVIN: As Mark said, there is the evidence is clear that there is not a significant or widespread problem with Canadians' ability to access and understand information about internet service offerings or to compare services, providers and prices.

1347 First, according to the latest report, of all CCTS complaints related to internet services, only 11 percent were related to quality of services in general and fewer than two percent were related to internet speeds. These results are inconsistent with there being a widespread problem with internet service performance not matching consumers' expectations.

1348 Second, according to the CRTC's own Transparency Report, 87 percent of Canadians do not report having any difficulty finding or understanding information when shopping for internet services. Moreover, of the 13 percent that did, there is no consistent pattern suggesting a significant problem to be addressed by regulation. Only two percent of Canadians referenced speeds, and only one percent indicated they found it difficult to compare services, providers or prices.

1349 What all this evidence suggests is that where dissatisfaction does exist, it’s not about the availability or clarity of information for customers but about the quality of the customer's internet service itself. Specifically, concerns seem to be focused on fixed wireless and satellite services.

1350 The United States is the only jurisdiction we know of that has implemented a broadband labeling regime, and we are not aware of any evidence that U.S. consumers have benefitted from the measure. In fact, we heard from Cogeco yesterday, which offers services in 13 markets in the U.S., that less than two percent of subscribers that access their website will review the label and that their customer department has dealt with complaints about the label and how difficult it is to understand.

1351 Other regulators, including in the UK and Australia, have recognised that a lighter touch, less prescriptive and voluntary frameworks would be more effective, more customer friendly, and less costly to implement.

1352 Melissa.

1353 M^me DUFOUR : Au sein de l'équipe Réseau de Bell, notre mandat est de fournir un service de haute qualité qui répond aux attentes de nos clients. Notre travail consiste à concevoir, à construire, à entretenir et à améliorer nos réseaux afin d'offrir une expérience uniforme et de haute qualité à mesure que notre base d'abonnés et leur utilisation des réseaux augmentent.

1354 Pour chacun de nos services FTTH, FTTN/DSL et sans fil fixe offerts sous les marques Bell et Virgin, nous offrons aux clients la possibilité de tester la vitesse de leur connexion à l'aide de l'équipement qui est installé à leur domicile.

1355 Nous effectuons également des tests nous‑mêmes. Ces tests démontrent clairement que les vitesses que les clients obtiennent habituellement pendant les périodes de pointe sont égales ou supérieures à celles que nous annonçons sur notre site Web comme étant la vitesse maximale.

1356 Voilà notre objectif : offrir les meilleurs services Internet qui répondent aux besoins et aux attentes de nos clients.

1357 Nous avons examiné le document du Conseil concernant ce que l'on appelle les taux de contention. Bien que nous comprenions cette mesure comme une façon d'envisager l'utilisation et la performance du réseau, nous ne la considérons pas comme un reflet utile de l'expérience client.

1358 Les clients se soucient de la performance de leurs services lorsqu'ils l'utilisent. C'est pour cette raison que les équipes d'ingénierie du réseau de Bell s'engagent à fournir cette performance, peu importe le niveau d'abonnement.?

1359 En ce qui concerne la divulgation d'une telle mesure au niveau d'un nœud ou d'un quartier, nous n'avons pas cette capacité aujourd'hui et nous ne croyons pas qu'il serait possible de la développer dans un délai raisonnable.

1360 MR. GRAHAM: The title of this proceeding is “Making it easier for consumers to shop for internet services”. As Phil and Melissa have shown, we already make accurate information on our service available to consumers. Across the industry, consumers overwhelmingly do not report having difficulty accessing and understanding that information.

1361 To the extent that certain consumers report any difficulty shopping for internet services, the real reason is that millions of them still do not have access to services they find adequate, most notably, modern fibre networks.

1362 Unfortunately, recent Commission policies threaten to permanently entrench this lack of choice, in particular, the policy that allows the largest ISPs in the country to abandon investment in favour of reselling each other's networks. Public policy should be focused on building the critical digital infrastructure that Canada needs and that connects Canadians to the opportunities they deserve, not on supporting one large incumbent that would rather not contribute to that objective going forward.

1363 The single biggest thing the Commission can do to make it easier for consumers to shop for internet services is to fix this policy mistake so that we can give millions of additional consumers access to the internet service options they want and deserve.

1364 With respect to potential regulation related to the disclosure of information on fixed broadband service quality, we have four key points.

1365 First, the record of the proceeding suggests that, if there is an issue that warrants regulatory intervention, it is limited to satellite and fixed wireless services. The Commission should therefore apply any new rules only to those types of transmission systems.

1366 Second, whatever systems the Commission chooses to include, the rules must apply equally to all competitors regardless of size of ownership. The concerns motivating this proceeding primarily stem from companies that are not currently subject to the Internet Code, such as small fixed‑wireless providers and Starlink. If these providers are not subject to any new regime, then it will be ineffective and unfair from the start. Moreover, as we indicated in our submissions, any obligation that is too onerous for small ISPs is likely just too onerous, period.

1367 Third, the Commission can achieve any intended objective in a manner that does not impose undue costs on ISPs by defining the peak period, 7:00 to 11:00 p.m., allowing ISPs flexibility to use any adequate testing methodology, and requiring that typical download and upload speeds during the peak period, along with network technology, be prominently displayed on relevant company websites.

1368 Fourth, prescriptive rules regarding testing methods and disclosure formats will lead to very high implementation costs and long implementation timelines. Unfortunately, the record on these issues is highly underdeveloped. As a result, before adopting any prescriptive testing methodologies or disclosure formats, the Commission will need to undertake additional process that is focused on two or three possible sets of specific obligations. This would provide the information required to make an evidence‑based decision on what rules should be adopted and the associated implementation timelines. Our preference is that the Commission avoid this extra process by adopting rules that are flexible, as we proposed.

1369 We thank the Commission for the opportunity to address these issues and look forward to addressing any questions you may have.

1370 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. Likewise, we’d like to thank you for appearing before us and presenting those remarks and answering our question, which will start off with Commissioner Abramson.

1371 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Good morning. Thanks for being here.

1372 In a way, this proceeding is about four sets of potential linked ‑‑ or linked potential obligations, if I can put it that way. You know, we’re talking about standardizing the way some things are measured, we’re talking about perhaps prescribing what some ought to measure, we’re talking about prescribing how they publish it, and we’re talking about prescribing in particular a label or a design for how it’s published. So those are sort of an escalating set of call them obligations, or potential obligations, that are on the table here.

1373 Can you just clarify for us, of the ‑‑ you know, walk us through those four and where Bell sits as to each of them.

1374 MR. GRAHAM: Sure. Thank you. And I think that’s a helpful way of clarifying our thoughts, so I appreciate the opportunity.

1375 I think what you’re hearing from us, if the Commission is going to prescribe standard measures, the specific metrics that need to be, you know, tested and disclosed, we understand and we’ve suggested in our remarks typical upload and download speed during the peak period and network technology type as the things that you could prescribe there.

1376 We are recommending that you prescribe in a detail way how they’re tested. We can get into in the course of the conversation, you know, how we test and how we view some of the testing possibilities that are out there, but our position on that is driven by the sort of practical cost implementation for different ISPs in trying to force everyone who may have invested in one or another method already to then move to a common method and the costs associated with that.

1377 But I think your third was, you know, prescribing these metrics be published. Again, I think you’ve heard from us that that ‑‑ we think that makes sense. If you’re going to have a measurement that you’ve prescribed, obviously, that information needs to be made available. I think the simplest way is to let companies figure out how to make that available on their websites, which is where we think consumers are looking for this sort of information.

1378 And then the last one you went to was prescribing the design and how it’s published. And there, we don’t think that that’s required and we think sort of the global norm is actually not to do that. There’s only really the one outlier regime in the U.S. that does that.

1379 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: In your filings you sort of, as some others did, cited the UK and the Australian codes of practice and guides and so on as helpful examples.

1380 In your view, do those constitute a model for Canada to follow?

1381 MR. GRAHAM: Let me say two things about that. The first is, you know, there’s always this difficulty when we do international comparisons of where are you starting from. Like you’ve mentioned today and others have mentioned, we’re starting from a different place in Canada already in two respects. One is in terms of the level of regulation that already applies with respect to disclosures to consumers and with respect to the governance of consumer complaints. We’ve got an extensive apparatus in Canada, you know, often quite extensive apparatus to deal with that. So that’s one difference.

1382 I think probably that suggests that even less intrusive measure is required here given what already exists.

1383 A second difference is the factual starting point. So I’ll come back to this, I’m sure, a number of times, but just in case it isn’t clear, like we deliver to our consumers already the speeds that we advertise. And I’ll just push this on the table because I think it’s very different from the starting point they had in those other jurisdictions.

1384 We advertise a maximum speed, an “up to” speed, and then we typically deliver during the peak period at or above that advertised maximum speed. And so we’re setting ourselves up to and then delivering on exceeding customer expectations because we’ve made investments in excellent network technology to do that and because we’ve set the bar at the right place.

1385 That wasn’t the case in other jurisdictions, and so, again, you really need to be thoughtful about how important those models might play out in practice and some of the unintended consequences. For example, a regime that required us to change what we currently describe today as a maximum speed and describe it as a typical speed, we’d be well within ‑‑ like we are well within the margins by which what we advertise is a maximum speed would be advertised as a typical speed in those other jurisdictions.

1386 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Sorry to interrupt, but we are guided by the changes to the Telecom Act to require you to advertise typical speeds during peak periods, not maximum speeds.

1387 MR. GRAHAM: Yes. So I think ‑‑ just if I get to the text of the Act, I think it would be compliance with the Act for you to say you must ‑‑ you must publish a speed that is the typical speed, but allow us, for example, if we choose to, to describe it as an up to or a maximum speed.

1388 I mean, it ‑‑ again, like ‑‑ otherwise, it’s a strange result. The effect would be making us make a claim that is less ‑‑ you know, less of a get out of jail free ‑‑ less where the ‑‑ we’d be raising consumers’ expectations. We still meet those expectations, so we don’t have any ‑‑ like we don’t have a concern about it from that perspective. We typically deliver a higher speed in the vast majority of cases than what we advertise as a maximum speed.

1389 But you just have to be thoughtful about how you import it. Like I’m not suggesting you should or could do nothing at all. I do think, to flash forward a little bit, the legislation allows you to target the measure at certain transmission systems. It specifically contemplates doing that. The problem seems to be in the couple of types of transmission systems that we mentioned this morning.

1390 So I won’t sort of go on and on about that, but I may come back to it because our position here is really motivated by our ‑‑ that first pillar I talked about, putting the customer first, making things intuitive and easy for the customer to understand, and where we do have ‑‑ like our position is guided by not having unintended consequences of regulation impeding our sort of laser focus on delivering that for the customer.

1391 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: And look, let's close that loop because we’re already there, or at least try to close some of it.

1392 You’ve called for using our exemption power, which is somewhere in that added section of the Act, to exempt ‑‑ I know I have it here in your presentation, so you’ll correct me, but everyone but satellite and fixed wireless delivered services which, of course, would be the vast majority of Canadian internet subscriptions.

1393 In your view, this is consistent with the intent of Parliament, is it?

1394 MR. GRAHAM: Yeah, it is. We think the Act is structured to take advantage of the Commission’s role as the expert regulator, your sort of institutional ability to run a process like this and gather the evidence. And if the evidence that’s available to you ‑‑ you’re hearing it from us, you obviously heard it from Telus. I think you heard the same thing from Cogeco. If the evidence that’s available is that fibre to the home, like fixed line internet providers are meeting or exceeding their advertised speeds are actually delivering services that meet or exceed their advertised speeds to customers, then very likely the costs of regulation outweigh the benefits and that’s the kind of decision that the Commission’s tasked with making through those exemptions.

1395 You know, you have to decide on fixed wireless and satellite, and I should be clear. We operate fixed wireless services, so ‑‑ and we operate satellite internet services in the north. We would be subject to those rules, but I think just being very ‑‑ trying to be helpful and very transparent, hearing the evidence, it sounds like that’s where the concerns are. So the regulation should be tailored to the concerns.

1396 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: You can see how it might seem circular that you’re proposing that because you already meet the advertised speeds you shouldn’t have to publicly show that you meet the advertised speeds.

1397 MR. GRAHAM: I appreciate what you’re saying, Commissioner Abramson, but I don’t think it’s an unusual proposition to suggest that if there’s not a ‑‑ like a market failure or a problem to be solved, then the default in our system should be that you don’t introduce new regulation because, inevitably, it comes with costs. And those are really ‑‑ the costs and the unintended consequences are what are guiding our recommendation.

1398 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Sure. I guess what I’m driving at is, you know, if the basis for the exemption is that the advertised speeds are already accurate, is there any sort of ongoing measure that would be required to demonstrate that and to continue the exemption or should we just assume everything is fine?

1399 MR. GRAHAM: I mean, you’d have various tools to engage in going monitoring, including periodic reviews of the framework, which you do under similar frameworks.

1400 Maybe I should sort of really pull back the curtain a little bit here just to make it really clear.

1401 The three of us, with a number of colleagues, sat in a number of meetings when this proceeding was launched where we discussed, and our initial reaction and focus was sort of similar to what TELUS told you. How do we use this proceeding to gain a marketing advantage?

1402 We’ve got the best networks. We’ve got great services. We over‑deliver for our customers, and we’re going to look good when there are these comparisons.

1403 So, you know, if we only included the product in network teams in those meetings, our position might have been quite similar to TELUS’ position just now.

1404 But ultimately, we’ve layered on top of that discussion two things: the sort of customer experience element and the IT implementation element based on how we thought the regime may go. And those led us to the recommendation we are making today, which is to really limit the scope of it.

1405 And that’s for the simple reason that, one, we really, really want to communicate clearly and effectively with our customers, and for us in the Regulatory team, part of that means sort of clearing away any regulation that could potentially and unintentionally impede our ability to do that, or could lead to things that our customers find confusing or unclear.

1406 And then the second reason is the unfortunate reality of telco is you know very well that you have a lot of legacy IT systems, and you have a limited number ‑‑ you have a limited capacity to make changes in those systems at any given time, because the universe of people who can lead and implement projects to change those systems is finite and small.

1407 We have a lot of things we want to do to help our customers and implementing those things we want to do, to continue to deliver on our top priority of putting the customer first requires all the resources that we have, and we wish we had more. So we really, really don’t want to divert those people toward implementing a regime that we think is not solving a problem our customers have. We want them focused on doing the things that we’ve prioritized to help our customers.

1408 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Understood. Priorities.

1409 I’m going to take a brief detour into the land of prices and contracts in order to ensure that we are creating a consistent record, and then we’ll probably return to some of the issues around network quality and service metrics, and all those fun things.

1410 So let me ask you about pricing clarity and contract length clarity.

1411 One of the approaches I had suggested to other intervenors and asked them to comment on is the possibility of making it a little easier to find one’s critical information summary in one’s contract, perhaps to which it’s attached, in the event they can’t quite find where it is.

1412 And I say that knowing that we do require a fair bit of information about pricing and about contract term, and so on, in the critical information summary.

1413 Do you think that would be an approach that would assist with pricing confusion, with contract term length confusion, if customers had the ability to easily and readily consult their contract in their portal, for instance, in their customer portal that Bell provides, to be clear?

1414 MR. GRAHAM: Thank you for the question. I will admit we don't ‑‑ similar to our colleagues from TELUS, I think I would rather take that in the form of an RFI and get back to you with a full set of considerations. I’m not foolish, like Stephen, to think I could get off the stand without an undertaking. But nevertheless, we will take it in the form of an RFI.

1415 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you. We will mop that up at the end, as we usually do, in terms of the form in which it’s to be provided, and all that fun stuff.

1416 Is there anything else on pricing clarity and on contract term length that we ought to take into consideration other than general satisfaction with the rules and not requiring any new ones?

1417 MR. GRAHAM: I don't think we have additional comment on that.

1418 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you.

1419 Let me talk about nutrition label before we get to the network itself.

1420 In your reply submission, I think you said it’s not surprising the respondents would support a nutrition‑style label when presented with a label. I wanted to follow up on that.

1421 Why is it unsurprising? If they were overwhelmed by it or if they were pretty sure they already knew everything they needed to know, wouldn’t a label presented to them simply be of little interest?

1422 MR. GRAHAM: I will build on the CTA’s submissions this morning.

1423 I think you heard that Eric mentioned the design of the question helpful or unhelpful. We don’t think that’s the right comparison. The comparison is more helpful than what’s in the market today. So, that’s one thing.

1424 And just the build‑on part is it’s a very different setting, a consumer in a focus group to discuss a document where they’re booked for an extended period of time to sit in that focus group, compared to an average real‑world consumer making a decision at say a time that they are moving house. They are going to make a decision about an internet plan, and they are going to visit a couple of websites.

1425 And what appears helpful when you’re sitting there with a few hours booked to sit in a focus group and try to be helpful to the questioner about a detailed policy issue is different than what’s helpful to someone making a decision in the real world.

1426 I should say we’re supportive of the Commission commissioning that research and that research being part of the record. We think it’s providing helpful insights.

1427 That particular question I don’t think answers are consumers better off with a standardized label format than without one.

1428 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thank you.

1429 Let me now move to Madam Dufour. Vous avez un titre intéressant aussi. Vous êtes responsable du best network.

1430 Can you talk to us about what that means? How do you know when Bell’s customers are experiencing the best network? And specifically, can you talk about the active and passive measurement that you do in order to constantly re‑evaluate that?

1431 M^me DUFOUR : Oui, pour mon titre, mon titre, c’est… maintenant, je suis responsable des appareils et du meilleur réseau de Bell. Donc, une partie de mon équipe est en charge de travailler à mesurer les différents metrics dans le réseau pour s’assurer que l’on offre les vitesses auxquelles les clients s’abonnent. Donc, c’est en principe notre grand objectif.

1432 Puis, pour ce faire, on va travailler avec les équipes d’ingénierie, des autres équipes, là, des autres équipes avec lesquelles on travaille pour aller faire des corrections si on trouve des problèmes dans le réseau. Donc, en principe, c’est le grand travail de l’équipe.

1433 I will explain how we do the testing in the network.

1434 So at Bell, we find it very important to be transparent with our customers and provide them the ability to show what the connectivity, what speed they get with their connectivity at all times.

1435 There is a variety of ways that we do speed testing. We can use an application on the device. For example, on your cell phone, we can use a specific hardware connected to a gateway, a bit like we did for the SamKnows CRTC a couple of years back. Those have limitations. Those methods have limitations, depending on the device capabilities.

1436 And we could not demonstrate some of the speeds that we were offering to our customers, for example, when we were offering 3 gig to our customers, and so on.

1437 So, Bell has implemented another way to demonstrate to our customer the speed they get is what they are expecting. So, we use a speed test engine that is installed directly on the gateway itself. It removes the device limitation.

1438 And then for the testing in itself, it’s pretty much the same thing as what all speed tests are doing. Traffic is sent back and forth from the gateway to speed test servers that are located in our central office behind the internet connectivity to measure the speed of this internet service.

1439 Our customer can initiate their own speed test validation using the same tool, and we also use it to do our own testing to monitor the performance of the network. That would be what you call the active testing.

1440 From these test results, we can confirm that most customers get the speed they expect. There are some cases where the results might be lower than what the customer expects. For example, if my husband is doing videoconferencing while my daughter is doing some gaming online, the results would show what is left of the bandwidth for that customer.

1441 Our engine is made that the customer could select, check‑box an option where the testing would be prioritized, and it would not take into account the current traffic that is passed on the connectivity at that time. That is to show the real bandwidth that is available for that customer.

1442 Obviously not every ISP will have access to that technology or that methodology, so there are other methods, as I mentioned, that exist to be able to provide the same ability, with some limitation and some incurred additional costs.

1443 Overall, the speed test methodology that I mentioned helps us confirm that the speed that we provide to our customer is as expected. We are also in favour of flexibility when it comes to recommend how the testing should be done by all the ISPs.

1444 In terms of the passive testing, I will not call it passive testing in my understanding of the network. We do monitor the network at different points in the network, for example, at the customer, at the OLT, which is one of the devices on TTH that aggregate all the fibre on the core of the network. And we are using the management systems that come with the tools to be able to collect the information and understand if there are issues with the systems overall.

1445 So, that’s what I would call passive.

1446 MR. GRAHAM: If I can just add one thing just to tie back the methodology that Melissa described.

1447 When I said to you that we meet or exceed the speed that we advertise as the maximum speed for customers, that includes testing in our sample where customers have not checked the box to say let the testing pre‑emp my other uses of the connection.

1448 So even when we include only a portion of the customer’s bandwidth in the testing results, we are meeting or exceeding what we’re advertising to customers. And you can imagine, it’s because we’re over‑provisioning the network to ensure that we do that.

1449 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: And that's again on the active testing side. I am trying to put together a good portrait.

1450 I guess when you talk about passive testing, this is ‑‑ when I talk about passive testing, this is really the observed characteristics of the traffic that you are seeing on your network. It’s things like real‑time performance monitoring. It’s things like the streaming telemetry that you get inside the network, what we used to call SNMP rolling, flow monitoring, and that sort of thing. Correct?

1451 MS. DUFOUR: That's correct.

1452 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Would that ‑‑ and I’m going to refer to that as passive measurement, as many do in the wider world. Would this passive measurement give you baseline data as to throughput, latency and jitter and packet loss?

1453 MS. DUFOUR: I thought about that when you asked the question to the TELUS team.

1454 To be honest with you, I don’t think it would be sufficient for us to be able to determine for a specific customer the speed that he can see the jitter or the packet loss for a specific customer. So, I don’t think it would be sufficient.

1455 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: And at a place of higher aggregation, whether it’s at a local CO or some other logical aggregation point?

1456 MS. DUFOUR: At this point in time, I wouldn't think it would be possible to do so, with passive testing.

1457 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Can you just provide a bit of colour on that? In other words, is it because the data would be less than ideal? You’re not pushing it to achieve true best performance? Or is it because it would be hard to aggregate the data that you have?

1458 MS. DUFOUR: The way I understand the passive testing, the way we discuss it, it’s not meant to look at it from a single customer perspective. So, I wouldn’t see how I would be able to qualify a specific customer based on this information. It’s aggregate information.

1459 However, this gives us information about different threshold that we set in the network for determining if the network could be congested at some point. We are working on ‑‑ we are acting on those monitoring and measure of potential congestion at different points in the network.

1460 I can explain it more, if you wish.

1461 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: I wasn't directly asking about congestion, but I’m glad you’ve raised it because it is on my list. So, please do.

1462 MS. DUFOUR: First of all, we manage congestion by monitoring the performance of our network at various points, as I mentioned, and we take steps to address any trends towards congestion using the thresholds. In other words, we don’t let our network get to congestion scenarios.

1463 For example, in our FTTH network, we have millions of customers connected to hundreds of thousands of ports that are themselves connected to thousands of OLTs, which are the box in the central office, that are backhauled to the core of our network. If there is a trend toward congestion at a port level, Bell can introduce new ports, move customers from one port to another, and so on, to manage congestion at that point. Similarly, if there are trends towards congestion in the backhaul from the OLTs, Bell will take action to increase the capacity to mitigate any impact on user experience.

1464 On the core network, the network team constantly manages the network capacity to deliver the expected experience to consumers.

1465 So with hundreds of thousands of ports, thousands of OLTs and core network devices, I’m sure you can appreciate the complexity and the scales of our network and also understand why it would be challenging to provide any geographical or disaggregated information to our consumers, as it was suggested in one of the mandates.

1466 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks. I would like to ask you about non‑speed metrics.

1467 As you know, the Act directs us, directs Canadian carriers to file service quality metrics separate from speed, and we’ve had some discussion over what those are. As you’ve explained, we’ve had discussion as to who ought to report them.

1468 Imagine for a moment that we don’t end up exempting most Canadian internet subscriptions from these requirements, what service metrics would be appropriate in order to best describe the nature of the quality of service that subscribers receive, from your point of view?

1469 MR. GRAHAM: To start from the position that we are in, in our view, the best network and we’re going to come out on top when you compare our network to others with things like latency or jitter or packet loss. Nevertheless, we’re not recommending, beyond network technology type, additional service metrics.

1470 I can’t believe I’m going to do this.

1471 You mentioned Tom Waits earlier, so I’ll use a lyric from my favourite Tom Waits song, which is “never let the weeds grow taller than the garden”.

1472 The garden, in our view, that’s the speed, the typical upload and download speed for the customer. That’s what they care about. Everything else is weeds that’s going to obscure the garden. So, we’re not recommending additional metrics.

1473 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks. Time continues to gallop.

1474 I am going to pause there and ask my colleagues to ask their questions, of which I know they have a number.

1475 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Commissioner.

1476 We will go to Commissioner Naidoo next, please.

1477 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Hi there. Thank you so much for being here.

1478 I wanted to talk a little bit about labels. The label issue, obviously we’ve heard a lot about that in this hearing so far. So many ISPs, as you’ve probably seen in the interventions and over the last few days, say that they are providing enough information. They don’t need to provide any more information through labels.

1479 But there is a bit of a disconnect. There are obviously some customers that we’ve heard from who say that they do need more transparent, concise information, because frankly they’re finding it confusing to navigate the system.

1480 What would you tell one of your customers who feels that they want more clarity? How would you address that?

1481 MR. GRAHAM: Thanks very much for the question.

1482 Obviously, we hope we have provided the necessary clarity. If we haven’t and we receive feedback from a customer that they want more clarity on a certain aspect of their service, we would try to provide them that information. Our Support Teams have tools and processes for doing that.

1483 And if your question is what would we say if the Commission knew ‑‑ in response to the idea that the Commission maybe has heard from a customer that they are not satisfied with the clarity of information they are getting from us, we would obviously have to look at the individual circumstance.

1484 When you are communicating to tens of millions of Canadians, you need to find the balance between what is enough information for those who want more extensive information and what is a clear and simple enough message for those who are short on time and want to get the most important point quickly, and what establishes the right expectations, allows you to succeed in the market and doesn’t result in your confusion that then comes back from customers as “I misunderstood this to mean something else”, or whatever.

1485 So, we’re always trying to find that balance. It’s a big job, and we’re probably not perfect at it. No one is. We are doing our best.

1486 And as I said, on the most important metrics, we think the balance we’ve struck, at least for now for us, works and is allowing us to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations, and therefore they are sort of appreciative of our network and the experience they have with us.

1487 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Are you saying that you have seen that some customers are calling to say hey, help me to figure this out? Are you taking some of those calls?

1488 MR. GRAHAM: Certainly, we provide extensive information to customers and respond to all kinds of queries about their services, how they’re operating, what their capabilities are. We do that through self‑serve tools. We do that through the Call Centre.

1489 So to go back to in our opening, we listed the customer principles that we’re working on. We take those very seriously. So making it intuitive and easy, respecting our customer’s time. We don’t want it to take a long time for them to figure something out that they need to know with us.

1490 Maybe I’ll leave it there at that level of generality. But certainly, we receive lots of customer enquiries, and we try to be as helpful as we can.

1491 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: I hear you when you are saying that too much information ‑‑ you’re not the first person who has come and said too much information can be confusing. It’s about providing the right information, and all of that.

1492 What do you think, if anything, is the downside to the public of ensuring that customers have more access to standardized information, not too much information, just the right amount standard across the board, to make as an informed a decision as possible, essentially casting a wider net as far as access to information, the same information across the board? Do you see a downside to that?

1493 MR. GRAHAM: Two parts to the answer for us. I will start with one, and then I may ask Phil to jump in on part of one.

1494 You sort of said it: the devil’s in the details; just the right information. So, we think what customers, the broad set of customers, want and potentially would benefit from some Commission standardized metric is typical upload and download speed and network technology type.

1495 We don’t think even latency, for the broad set of customers, is an intelligible metric. For most customers, they are not concerned about that metric. And one of the ways you know that is that providers don’t advertise my latency is X milliseconds, other than in the unique case of some of the satellite providers.

1496 Like if you went to the Starlink website, you would see they have a whole animation on latency, because it’s known to be an issue for the target market for their service. But for other customers, it’s weeds obscuring the garden. So getting the balance right and the right types of information.

1497 So when you say what’s the downside? If we got it wrong there’d be a downside, and if it's wrong in a regulatory requirement, it's very hard to change. If we think information is valuable to customers we try to disclose it and the call centre blows up because customers don't know what we're talking about and all of a sudden they’re confused and they assume it means something bad when we actually thought it meant something good.

1498 You know, latency is really low, oh, low? That's bad, I want high speed and they start calling in or whatever, we can pivot quickly. But if it's a relatively requirement, the change is necessarily slower.

1499 The second thing is just ‑‑ it just goes back to my, you know, costs and trade offs around IT in an environment of a telecom company. You know, without going on a long discussion about this, unless you'd like me to, across the open proceedings you have dealing with you know, amendments to the Telecommunications Act. We already know from the evidence we've been able to gather in the limited sort of time we've had to scope so far, our costs of implementing the determinations are going to exceed certainly $50 million, likely $100 million, and potentially growing significantly from there.

1500 And as the CTA had mentioned, that funding that's diverted from other things. But also, just as importantly, that's that finite pool of resources we have to do projects that touch our IT and network systems, and it's diverting those resources from projects that are very important to our customers and that can deliver widespread and extensive benefits for our customers.

1501 So that's the other downside. I mean, if you want, Phil can get into a little bit about what we have on the record so far around costs for providing some of the information in label and what's not covered in our estimate of costs on that.

1502 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: I'm not sure that we need it, because you said it was on the record already. So I want to just flesh things out a little bit.

1503 So are you saying that ‑‑ you're saying that you're providing the right information already, right? You're saying that if there was label there's certain information that people should be providing in addition to what you are already providing is what you're saying, right?

1504 MR. GRAHAM: I mean, in our case, as I said we're disclosing ‑‑ well we advertise them as maximum speeds, they are in fact typical peak time speeds, because we don't want our customers to be disappointed in what they receive.

1505 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Okay. But you raised costs as being one of the prohibitive factors.

1506 So to rectify that, to sort of get at it, there's the cost thing, but are you saying that the information could be useful, if there could be a way to figure out the cost? It sounds to me like you're saying, look, we think we're providing enough information.

1507 But if you were going to have to put some standardized information out there, you've just outlined for me, I think you said about four points. So it sounds like cost is the prohibitive thing, but you think there are ways to get the right information to consumers. Am I understanding that?

1508 MR. GRAHAM: Yes, I think that’s right. We’re saying doing it in the format of a standardized label that has to be incorporated as some have suggested into contract, into a CIS, whatever else, touches lot of IT systems, a lot of like IT work to create something like that. Our costs on the record don't ‑‑ we didn't even begin to contemplate a geographically disaggregated, that's even going to change the costs. So that's the cost element, is the standardized label.

1509 But if the question ‑‑ and then another cost element is how do you test? We've invested, as Melissa described, in testing capabilities including an engine that customers can use in their own gateway to run their own tests so they can be satisfied with their service.

1510 If you prescribe, okay, but not everyone has that, if you made everyone else do that, that would be very costly for other ISPs if they don't have it. If another ISP has an application that they put on the customer's phone, but we have an application that we put on the customer's phone because we have it on their gateway and you made us do the application, that's an added cost to us to no benefit.

1511 So what we're saying is if there's ‑‑ if you make determination that for certain types of transmission systems there is a lack of clarity from some providers about the typical download and upload speeds, or about the network technology type, typical download and upload during peak period, you could require them to disclose those typical download and upload speeds during the peak period. Tell them what the peak period is. And you would require them to disclose network technology type.

1512 And the requirement could be, you know, make prominent, however you want to sort of, describe it on your company website, because we think that's a low‑cost implementation compared to a standardized label format.

1513 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Okay. So let's flesh that out again. You were very clear with how you explained it.

1514 But I asked this question earlier of another intervenor, and I think of fairness I should ask it to you too, because there's certain ISPs feel differently. Some feel that there's enough information out there so why do we need a label? It's redundant, and so on and so forth.

1515 So I just want to get your sense so it's on record to an analogy. Some food companies as we all know cot and restaurants, provide nutritional information on their websites. They did it prior to, you know, even having to legislate a label. But they also now provide labels on food in addition to what ‑‑ you can go on their website and you can find it, you can also find it at the grocery store right on the food. Those two practices complement each other, and some would argue that there's no downside to customers since it's about access to information.

1516 So you're giving them lots of access to information, specific information, but wherever consumers can use it, right? So I'm wondering why would having current practices plus a label ‑‑ or do you think that having current practices plus a label would be a positive thing, a negative thing, or what's your thoughts on that?

1517 MR. GRAHAM: We're not recommending that you add a standardized label to current practices. I think there's a couple ‑‑ I don't want to get hung up too much on the food packaging analogy.

1518 But you know, one big difference is when you're comparing two boxes of cereal you are standing in a grocery store aisle. When you're comparing two companies potential Internet plans, you are on your computer going to their websites. So it's not that helpful if somewhere on the Kellogg's website there's nutritional information. When food labels were introduced in the 80s or whatever and I was standing at the grocery store aisle, had no ability to access the website.

1519 But it's a different situation if I'm shopping for Internet services and I'm on two companies’ websites. If the information is prominently displayed on the website, then the label is kind of not necessarily and not adding anything. And then there's the cost element.

1520 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you so much for answering my questions. That's all I have, thanks.

1521 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Commissioner.

1522 We’ll go to Commissioner Paquette next, please.

1523 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Hello.

1524 So you suggest that upload speed, download speed, and network technology be the information that could be standardized. I was wondering when it comes time to determine what information the clients need, do you put all the customers on the same foot in your assessment of what information is useful? Or are their customers that would need more information that we should take into account?

1525 And the easy examples are the gamers, would the gamer ‑‑ should the gamers be aware of the latency, as an example?

1526 MR. GRAHAM: Yeah, it’s a good question and it helps illustrate, I think, where we're coming up when we talk about our recommendation here. Certainly, you know, we view gamers as an important market segment as the company with the best network, the best technology, including not just latency but in our case upload speed is also important to a streamer or a gamer.

1527 And so, those customers may want additional information on nature of the service, and we have lots of people internally who are focused on how do we most clearly and effectively communicate to those customers about our service. And I think the ecosystem, specialized publications, companies’ marketing efforts, you know, like disclosures that companies are doing in their own commercial interest, the peer to peer kind of word of mouth, all that.

1528 The gamers are as an example, very well informed on what attributes of the service, what companies’ services have the attributes that are useful for their activities. And that's the same for, sort of, other specialized segments.

1529 And you know, our position comes from recognition that companies have the right incentive to provide that information to those specialized user groups. Those user groups can access the information, and I think there is a good understanding, and you can sort of see this if you go in the right circles on Reddit or whatever online. There is an understanding among those user groups, they know which companies have the services that meet their needs.

1530 And so, when you're taking a perspective of what should the regulations stipulate and require all providers to do in some uniform way, there's not need there. And then there's a risk and cost associated with how you do it on the regulatory level, how adaptive it is to changes in what user segments need.

1531 Because what a gamer needs today isn't what they needed 10 years ago, and it's not going to be what they need five years from now, and can the regulation really adapt and keep pace with that? Does it truly reflect what they need? And does trying to target every individual unique user segment and obscuring what matters most to everybody, which is in our estimation, the typical upload and download speed and network technology type.

1532 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: We had as you know, Telus just before you, were offering to include latency in the information that should be standardized. They say that it's easy ‑‑ it's an easy information to provide and it's also measurable. What's your reaction to their position? What do you think of their position?

1533 MR. GRAHAM: As I said, this goes back to as I talked about, we had conversations, can try to gain a marketing advantage through the regime. This ‑‑ you know, that's one of the elements.

1534 So should be perfectly transparent and honest, I'm not having a major allergic reaction latency. I really, like fundamentally, we want to communicate with our customers in the way that is going to be clearest and most intuitive for them. I just ‑‑ if we want to communicate latency, we will. And we will communicate it in a way that we think is going to lead to the right understand for the customers it is communicated to.

1535 I think we have a slightly different judgment from Telus in terms of, if you just had an, all providers must ‑‑ it must just say latency and a millisecond number. You know, you can all think of someone you know who sees 1.5 gigabytes per second and they understand that's better the 50 megabits per second. And then they see 25 milliseconds latency and they someone else with 100 and milliseconds latency. If you exclude anybody who's watching or following this proceeding, what percentage of people know that the 50 milliseconds latency is better than the 100 milliseconds latency? And so, they know that bigger is better for speed but smaller is better for latency.

1536 I just think from when we get in to regulating that type of disclosure there's a risk that you take away, or you cause companies communicate things in a way that are unintentionally confusing to some consumers. And in the absence of like, a demonstrated need for that, you're better to let the companies who are fighting really hard in a really competitive market to win subscribers, figure out the most effective way to communicate that.

1537 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: And is your position on jitter similar? Is it more like on information that you provide if necessary, but would it be as easy to provide as latency, or is there additional degree complexity here?

1538 MR. GRAHAM: I’ll let Melissa weigh in if she wants on whether it's harder to measure and surface for customers. I mean, I think it's my own sense, and from talking to some of our team is it's probably it is a small universe of people who understand latency, there's you know a subset of that universe who then understands jitter and relevance of it to their use.

1539 But in terms of measurement, I'd have to defer to Melissa.

1540 MS. DUFOUR: So in our testing methodology we have abilities to get the latency measures and the jitter information. So that's something that is available, as well as typical speed on download and upload.

1541 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Okay. Yes.

1542 MR. GAUVIN: I just want to add to that. There are a lot of interrelated questions here. Can the regulator or the industry come up with just the right amount of information for customers, which is a bit of a Goldilocks question, because different customers have different needs.

1543 And on the packet loss and jitter, it's very technical. Latency is very technical and there is only a small percentage of customers actually understand it. And in the United States the label initially had packet loss information in the label. It was deemed to be confusing. The FCC eliminated it, and that's a metric that might be slightly understandable that jitter.

1544 We have a description of jitter in our intervention. Latency is the delay of when a packet will reach a certain point, go from one point to another. Jitter is variances in that latency. So it is possible for a packet to be sent second, but arrive at its destination first. But explaining that to customers, what does the jitter metric mean, is something that’s very complicated and for most customers is meaningless.

1545 And the proceedings that ‑‑ the decisions that were in 2018 and 2019 on quality of service metrics, those were to establish quality of service metrics for a basic service. So when the Commission funds broadband, what should be deemed a high‑quality level of service that is funded? And it was determined, you know not to be 50 milliseconds, .25 percent packet loss, 5 milliseconds of jitter.

1546 And having said that, the current funding RFPs don't require the products to meet that currently, because the current priority is for the speeds to be provided in areas that don't have those speeds. And you shouldn't eliminate ISPs then provide high speeds just because they don't meet those quality of service metrics. For example, satellite providers.

1547 So I wouldn't draw from those decisions a characterization that there should be those types of quality of service metrics advertised proactively to consumers. On our website we try to meet the Goldilocks requirement by having a whole bunch of different information available on the website.

1548 There is information on the Wi‑Fi can limit your speed testing. There is an accessibility centre available at the bottom, so if you want to have information on services for cognitive disabilities or physical disabilities there's links there as well.

1549 So we try to meet that, and we don't think that standardized information will necessarily lead to better outcomes. It's likely to have ‑‑ to result in standardized information on websites that will be ignored, like Cogeco said has happened in the U.S., the 2 percent that consult the labels.

1550 COMMISSIONER PAQUETTE: Thank you very much. Pas d'autres questions.

1551 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thanks.

1552 So Cogeco told us yesterday that “up to” pricing, or “up to” speed marketing was kind of a standard global practice. But both you and Telus have told us today that there's actually little if any spread between advertised prices that are kind of max or up to, and your actuals.

1553 So was this kind of the end of the up to speed advertising era? And is that applicable to your other network beyond just your fibre to the home network? Does it apply equally to your fixed wireless satellite services?

1554 MR. GRAHAM: So I'll take the questions in reverse order.

1555 Yes, in our case what we advertise is the maximum up to speed we meet or exceed most of the time during peak period across our network ‑‑ across our networks, and across those network types with the range of customers. So it applies to all FTTH, FTTN, DSL, fixed wireless.

1556 I don't know that we have a prognostication on whether this is the end of the “up to” speed era. I think there's ‑‑ I think that will be something that's different providers will determine. What's the most effective way to help consumers understand what they will get when they subscribe to my service, and that will engender customer trust, leave them feeling like you were honest, you were clear, you met or exceeded their expectations while also allowing it to communicate the full capability of the technology.

1557 So that they know, you know, not just that you won't miss the expectations, but also the full power of what they are getting in you know, the best of circumstances. And I think each provider is going to determine that, and I don't know that I have a prognostic, like I guess on how that's going to go.

1558 THE CHAIRPERSON: Yeah, and I guess the real heart of my question is, what’s the value to the consumer of knowing what that max speed is if that's not the speed they are committed to delivering to them? So is there any value in having the two numbers reported, or shouldn't we just required that the most accurate number be reported to the customer?

1559 MR. GRAHAM: I mean, I think consistent with our ‑‑ starting from what we think you should require, if you're going to require wireline providers to disclose metrics, I think the requirements should be we’ve said, typical upload and download speeds.

1560 I do think there's value to consumers and also knowing what the maximum speed is. It could be because they have certain activities that they undertake outside of peak periods where they benefit from having a very high level of potential speed. I mean, I think like you could get into a question of whether it has to actually achievable, as opposed to some very theoretical maximum.

1561 You know, there was discussion about theoretical maximums engineering specifications versus real world achievable. But when we're talking about maximum speed, we're thinking more a speed that the customer can actually ‑‑ the maximum speed the customer can actually achieve. That typically goes to whether they do in fact achieve it frequently or almost never, or whatever.

1562 So you know I'm a customer who with a certain type of ‑‑ who works from home, you know, and does a certain type of database work from home and they want to upload full copies of a database from time to time, just to use one very specific example, they benefit from having a very high speed service that can do that, and they can upload the database at 3:00 in the morning. So it doesn't matter to them that. Like it really matters to them what the full capability of the service is. A gamer could be the same kind of thing.

1563 And then I think Telus said, and you know, it's sort of intuitive, if you know what typical speed is and you know what the maximum speed is, it's giving you some visibility into the variability in a way that, you know, is transparent that you can build some intuition around, you know, what your variability might be around that typical speed as well. So if you have a typical speed that's very closely aligned to the maximum speed, it tells you something about the way the network performs using a measure that you can understand.

1564 And so that's another benefit that a provider may think is delivered to their consumers from promoting the maximum speed. But I don’t ‑‑ again, like to our point about sort of low touch and let providers figure out how to be clear with their consumers and avoid confusing them, I don't see a need to regulate that people do provide the maximum speed. I wouldn't prevent it because I think it can be useful, but I could see a reason to regulate that they have to.

1565 MR. GAUVIN: I just wanted to add to that that the “up to” calibrates or sets expectations as to what the speed can be achieved. And if you think of 10 years ago when we were talking about what should be the basic service level for broadband, there was discussion about the death of Michael Jackson and you know, how it flooded networks.

1566 Today, streaming probably isn't as big a load on services, but certainly if a video game, you know, a popular video game is released on a certain time and everyone downloads it at the same time, it is possible that point in time there's going to be congestion on the network that impacts connections.

1567 And the speeds that are advertised convey that it's an “up to” speed, you're not going to get it all the time. Typical is similar, I mean we can have a debate as to whether it provides the same level of calibration of expectations, but up to is clear in our view.

1568 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you.

1569 I think part of what I heard in that answer is the variance between typical and max speed gives some insight into a company’s provisioning practices, similar to what we had hoped, or we had proposed that you know, oversubscription ratio might give insights into provisioning practices of an ISP. So this would help customers shed some light on that, or it’s a bit of a proxy for kind of the quality of the network in some regards?

1570 MR. GRAHAM: I think that’s right. The thought I'm having is again, I think a provider needs to figure out if they advertise that maximum speed. You don’t ‑‑ I mean, in our judgment you should only do that if you are confident that you can deliver something that resembles that speed in some meaningful set of circumstances for your customers.

1571 So I don't want to, you know, again that's why I'm hesitant on the instead of oversubscription required that you disclose the maximum and the typical, because there may be some providers who don't deliver anything close enough to the maximum, anything close to often enough for it to be reasonable for them to disclose that. Or at least to be forced to disclose that, if in their judgment they shouldn't disclose the maximum theoretical speed because they don't want customers to get the wrong idea.

1572 So I'm just sensitive to that. But subject to that I think I agree with what you're saying.

1573 THE CHAIRPERSON: Okay. Thank you very much for answering all of our questions today.

1574 We noted at least one as we went along or there will be an RFI to follow up, but they'll be on the RFI schedule as opposed to any undertaking schedule.

1575 And with that, I thank you again and give you a chance for a final thought to leave us with.

1576 MR. GRAHAM: Okay. Thank you.

1577 I won’t repeat a bunch of what we said. I do want to start by saying, you know, I was here it feels like just the other day, here again today, I see some of again I think next week. It's not usual, common anymore I think, where we participate in these forums this frequently, but as I think Stephen was saying, genuinely we find it helpful. It helps us clarify our thinking.

1578 I hope it helps respond to some of the issues. Be more responsive to the issues that are on your mind than we are able to be just guessing in written submissions. We know it takes a lot of work for you all and for staff, as it does for some of the folks on our team, but we think it is time well spent. So we appreciate the opportunity to be here.

1579 You know, at a very pedestrian level, there's one thing didn't talk very much about that I just want to emphasize, which is the importance of any rules that you might implement applying to all providers, regardless of size.

1580 You know, I was on the website of a small fixed wireless provider in province you heard some from yesterday, this morning, and we compete with that provider, and they advertise a 50 megabit per second, it doesn't say up to, it doesn't say you know maximum potentially achievable speed. Just says 50 megabit per second plan, and it says it ensures you have sufficient connectivity for all the users in your home, and it provides a reliable connection.

1581 I don't know what actual performance that provider delivers, but I suspect that it's things that that are the source have a lot of the motivation for this legislative amendment and the job that you’re all now tasked with doing.

1582 And genuinely, I think it would be inconsistent with Parliament's intent and the objectives of the legislation to exempt all those smaller providers, exempt you know, foreign owned satellite services, like Elon Musk’s Starlink, from transparency requirements that we are saying are necessary to protect consumers.

1583 So we didn’t talk a lot about that, it's not necessarily the note I wanted to end on, but I do think it's very important. And then the sort of, corollary of that is that if you're going to exempt smaller providers, there's a fundamental unfairness in the way the Internet Code already works today on some of these other rules, which is if you're a small subsidiary of large provider you're subject to the code even though you have a separate set of IT systems, you don't have the economies of scale of getting those IT systems to comply with the code anymore than an independent small provider.

1584 And yet you have to do the work and so your customers have to incur the cost when independently owned smaller provider doesn't. That's a fundamental fairness that's built into the existing system. The existing system is not on the table here, but what you do in this preceding is.

1585 So our main message is it should ‑‑ any rule should apply to all providers regardless of the size of ownership, who they are, whether they're foreign owned, particularly if they're foreign owned satellite providers that have more than half a million customers in the country. And if you're going to exempt those smaller providers, you should exempt the smaller affiliates of the main providers too because of the costs we're talking ‑‑ we've talked about are very real.

1586 So sorry to end on a sort of more regulatory, a negative note, but it's a really important point and we really do appreciate the opportunity to answer your questions.

1587 THE SECRETARY: Thank you.

1588 We will now break for lunch and be back at 1:15.

‑‑‑ Suspension à 12:29 p.m.

‑‑‑ Reprise à 1:19 p.m.

1589 THE SECRETARY: Welcome back. You may introduce yourself, and when you’re ready you may begin.

Présentation

1590 MS. MANHAU FUNG: Good afternoon, Mr. Vice‑Chair and Commissioners. My name is Jenna Fung, I am the Senior Campaigner from OpenMedia, a community‑driven organization working to keep the internet open, affordable, and surveillance‑free.

1591 My colleague from CIPPIC, who is Melissa, who originally was planning to testify together with me today, but she’s not feeling well, so I send my apologies.

1592 And now we have David, so I will pass it over to David for him to introduce himself, but I’m aware most people know him in this room.

1593 Over to you, David.

1594 MR. FEWER: Thank you. Greetings. My apologies, my friend has fallen ill and I’ve been asked to step in. I have peripheral familiarity with this file, so there may be a few questions you ask us that I’ll have to take on reserve and get back to you, but I’ll do my best.

1595 Good afternoon, I’m David Fewer, I’m the General Counsel at CIPPIC, which is the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic based at the University of Ottawa. I’m here with Jenna Fung from OpenMedia, which is a community‑driven organization working to keep the internet open, affordable and surveillance‑free.

1596 CIPPIC and OpenMedia have a longstanding mutual commitment to advancing the public interest in Canada’s telecommunications landscape. We have no financial stake in the outcome of this proceeding, but the individuals and communities that we represent do. For them, a lack of transparency in telecommunication markets translates directly into financial harm, stress, and a diminished ability to make informed choices.

1597 We commend the Commission for the important steps it’s taking in this proceeding. The introduction of broadband “nutrition labels” for home internet plans is a welcome move towards transparency and fairness.

1598 But we’re urging the Commission to go further by extending these same standardized disclosure requirements to mobile services.

1599 Mobile services are not a secondary concern. For many Canadians, mobile devices are their primary gateway for accessing the internet and the essential the public services available through it. When it comes to transparency and plan information, mobile users are being left behind.

1600 MS. MANHAU FUNG: The public opinion research commissioned by the Commission shows that the problems faced by mobile and internet consumers are virtually identical. Ten per cent of mobile users and 13 per cent of internet users reported being dissatisfied with information available to them. At the same time, just 23 per cent of mobile users and 22 per cent of internet users said that they are very satisfied.

1601 But satisfaction metrics don’t tell the whole story. What’s more revealing is the persistent disconnect between how confident consumers feel at the point of purchase and what happens after they sign‑up. Respondents may say they are satisfied with the information available to them. But that hasn’t translated into fewer complaints or clearer understanding, and those gaps show‑up in the real world.

1602 The CCTS’s most recent annual report shows that the wireless complaints are not going down, they’re climbing. Wireless complaints reached a five‑year high in 2023–24, making up 52 per cent of all telecom complaints, which is a 27 per cent increase from the previous year. The top issues listed were disclosure problems, billing errors, and broken promises around credits and promotions

1603 This tells us that even when consumers think they have the right information, the current system isn’t helping them make confident, accurate choices. Consumers are being left in the dark, and they are paying the price. This proceeding gives the Commission a crucial opportunity to change that.

1604 MR. FEWER: The United States has taken action on broadband transparency by introducing standardized “nutrition labels” for internet services. That’s a useful model, but Canada has a chance to do better. The U.S. approach was designed to improve broadband access under infrastructure legislation. Here, the goal is broader; improving consumer protection across the board.

1605 That makes it all the more striking that only internet services are being considered for labels at this point. Mobile users face the same lack of clarity, the same frustrations, and the same need for reliable information.

1606 If the Commission agrees that internet customers deserve better tools to understand what they’re paying for, the same logic must apply to mobile. Anything less creates an unjustified gap in protection and leaves millions of Canadians navigating the mobile market without the same basic support.

1607 Our position is informed in part by your dissenting opinion in CRTC 2024‑293, Commissioner Abramson. While that dissent addressed a different context, the call for a more data‑driven and equity‑aware approach to consumer protection resonates with the issues raised in this proceeding.

1608 Commissioner Abramson expressed concern that without structured and machine‑readable formats, even well‑intentioned transparency frameworks may fall short of their potential. That insight helped shape our recommendation to ensure all consumer labels are not only visible, but also machine‑readable and publicly accessible in a centralized, open‑data repository.

1609 We therefore recommend that the Commission: first, expand the “nutrition label” requirement to include mobile; and, require that labels be presented in machine‑readable formats to support third‑party tools and accessibility.

1610 Machine‑readable formats are essential to realizing the full potential of the label framework. It’s a data framework. Don’t think of it as a label framework, think of it as a data framework. By machine‑readable, we mean formats like CSV or JSON, structured digital files that computers can easily parse and use without manual copying or reformatting.

1611 They allow comparison tools, like PlanHub, WhistleOut, or tools built by consumer rights organizations, to automatically access and display current plan details in ways that are easy for consumers to navigate and act on. Such tools help users filter by what matters to them, whether that’s data limits, throttling policies, international roaming charges or, as we heard today, jitter.

1612 A centralized, publicly accessible repository on the Commission’s website would ensure that this information is not only accurate but consistent, complete, and auditable. It would extend the benefits of transparency beyond individual provider websites, supporting public literacy, digital inclusion, and better regulatory oversight.

1613 The Commission has rightly recognized that empowering consumers with accurate and accessible information is a foundational part of its consumer protection mandate. We’re simply asking that it apply the principle across the board.

1614 As the 2023 policy directive emphasizes, “clarity and transparency of pricing information and service data plan details” must be core to the Commission’s decisions. A consumer can’t shop wisely without tools to compare. And in a marketplace as concentrated as Canada’s, where competition is already limited, consumers can’t afford to be kept in the dark.

1615 Extending these disclosure rules to mobile plans is a practical and powerful way to strengthen competition, reduce harm, and show that the Commission is listening and acting in the interest of Canadians.

1616 Thank you for your time and attention. We’d be happy to take any questions.

1617 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much for your written submissions and for appearing today. Sounds like it’s not exactly the roster you expected, but so much better that you’re able to be here than not be here.

1618 Just to put you at ease, we do have written requests for information as a tool at our disposal. So if there are any questions you’re not comfortable answering, just indicate so and we can follow‑up that way.

1619 With that, we’ll turn things over to Commissioner Desmond to start off the questioning.

1620 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Good afternoon and thank you both for being here and sharing your thoughts. I did have a chance to read the intervention of OpenMedia and in many ways you refer to the submission of PIAC and their reliance I think on the priority of protecting the public.

1621 So, as I understand your submission, much of what you’re suggesting is from the lens of wanting to protect the public and consumers of these services.

1622 Over the course of the last couple of days we’ve heard from service providers who have indicated that, in their view, they think the information they’re providing is already meeting the requirements of the legislation and that they’re doing a very good job of providing the information to consumers.

1623 I’m wondering if you might be able to respond to that. You know, I don’t think that for many ISPs they see that there is much more to be done. Would you agree with that?

1624 MR. FEWER: I’ll answer this one. In many ways I see this approach as a very light regulatory touch. Where what we’re asking ‑‑ I mean, there’s a bunch of asks associated on the backside of standardized labels, including, you know, standardized measurements and kind of consistency across competitors. Those are good things.

1625 To the extent that service providers say that they’re already providing this information, it’s difficult for me to see then what is the opposition to providing it in a way that’s more easily comparable, that allows consumers to do a better job of shopping.

1626 Ordinarily, we say that providing good information to consumers, better information to consumers, promotes competition, promotes, you know, all the goals that we have listed in the Broadcasting Act and Telecommunications Act. And so I don’t have a lot of sympathy to the arguments that say we’re already providing this information. You know, where’s the opposition then?

1627 All we’re asking for is a way to provide it in a standardized format. We’re asking a little bit more in this in the machine‑readable format. We think that is ‑‑ you know, again, this is an ask for data, and making that data available in a consistent machine‑readable format I think is the most efficient mechanism for making this regulatory, this light touch regulatory approach effective.

1628 Because it allows consumers to access that information using tools that are consumer‑focused and not driven by a marketing program. And allows consumers to use those tools to figure out what is important to them. So if jitter’s not important, if price is important, if coverage is important, you know, if caps are important, whatever it is, the consumer’s able to use a tool to access that information.

1629 The last point that I wanted to make on this, and Jenna’s got a point she’d like to add, the last point I’d like to make on this is I think the value of really understanding this is a data problem.

1630 And so using a tool like open data is basically using solutions that came up over a decade ago to solve data problems. Government is used to providing open data, it’s used to making data like this accessible to the public in very easily accessible formats.

1631 So, again, I’m not seeing this solution, you know, this proposal as being difficult. I think this is, as I said, a light regulatory touch that only will improve the marketplace.

1632 MS. MANHAU FUNG: And to add to that, I think what we are asking right here right now is to help contextualize those data for consumers. Some other service providers mentioned that how the numbers themselves of like latency or jitter might not be like helpful for most consumers, but indeed these metrics are coming up more and more and it’s not irrelevant to our daily lives.

1633 Like, think about people how game. Not everyone’s a competitive gamer, but then, you know, we play games at home casually. But latency happens and does really affect people who want to enjoy what they are entitled to enjoy, right? It’s not like everyone should just like bear with poor quality and play Candy Crush.

1634 Because poor latency will really affect you if someone just wants to use the monthly plan they pay for, and it’s not cheap, to play a first‑person shooter game and, you know, if there is like a really high‑paying connection, you die right on the spot and you just cannot play the game. So this is like a really vivid everyday live example that I wanted to point out there. So it is not irrelevant.

1635 So asking for a standardized label is to, you know, create a format that people can understand. Even for us in this room, we study extensively before we come here for discussion, but not everyone understands all the terms. But since these terms are becoming more commonly seen in daily life, our job is to help contextualize them in different ways.

1636 Sometimes maybe it’s like very technical, then maybe try to help find calculable or percentage relevancy to help contextualize it. You know, earlier some intervenors mentioned that, you know, we do have studies before we purchase a plan online. But we also don’t need a law degree or tech degree before we purchase something. We are asking for some information displayed in a format that’s easy for comparison.

1637 Because now, without regulated standardized formats consumers are subject to whatever language these companies are using, and it’s just hard to do comparisons and it really affects them when they try to make an informed decision.

1638 So that’s the points I really wanted to add. Like, in these kind of situations consumers become very vulnerable in this very imbalanced relationship.

1639 Like, imagine this type of standardized label we are asking for, for instance, will help seniors, newcomers, low‑income households, people in rural areas or anyone who can’t afford doing an extensive amount of research before they purchase any services that they need these days.

1640 Imagine if you are doing a job interview and because your internet is not stable or reliable, and then that affects people’s daily life.

1641 And the reason why we believe that the standardized labeling or a format to display information is that because, like, for instance, seniors may struggle with digital interface and complex billing. I work with a lot of community members these days, and some seniors don’t even know how to reply to my email when they really want to express themselves.

1642 So, we cannot just assume people can use this complex corporate branding stuff that each company are doing based on their own interest and resources. And so, to name that, don’t forget, like, there are people from low incomes or people in rural areas that simply cannot afford better service sometimes, or they are in locations where the infrastructure is built on, legacy infrastructure where they absolutely have no choice.

1643 And so, I believe it is very important to make the information more visible and accessible to people who need it, and that will be very helpful, and that is exactly why we think that we need this type of information out here.

1644 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Okay, thank you very much.

1645 Maybe just where we have heard from so many different interest groups coming from different perspectives ‑‑ we’ve heard from the telecom providers, we’ve heard from accessibility groups ‑‑ and hearing different messages.

1646 So, I guess I’m interested to hear from you, if the Commission were to say we’re going to mandate certain pieces of information ‑‑ key pieces of information ‑‑ what would you identify as by the most important pieces of information that a consumer would require for purchasing a plan?

1647 MR. FEWER: Okay, I am not going to have that information off the tip of my fingers, but I know what the answer is, and the answer is that the CRTC has surveyed consumers about what information is important to them, and that ‑‑ that has to inform what appears on the label. There may be niche groups where certain information is particularly important. I’m thinking of gamers, and so there may be kind of like an intensity to something that’s relatively low, but again, this is information that should come out in the data polling consumers about what they need.

1648 So, if you’re looking for a list of what has to be there and where the cut‑off is, I don't have that for you, but I would say that the labels should be informed ‑‑ the data should be informed by what consumers have told us that they want.

1649 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Earlier you mentioned contextualizing some of the information, and there have been suggestions that, if we were to provide or mandate standardized information, it would be important to provide for consumers information about what the plan supports. So, does it support X number of users streaming, X number of videos, for example? Is that something you think would be helpful for consumers, to have a real example of what the service can do?

1650 MS. MANHAU FUNG: I will go ahead first, since we prepared some notes on this topic, and I will pass it over to David later to add a little bit more on that.

1651 So, at a high level, the simple answer is yes, because examples can help empower people to understand all this, like, tech jargon as well as the context on how they can link it back to their own daily life, but at the same time, in terms of, like, relevancy, we also think that this type of label should also reflect their real user experience. And one thing that might be helpful for them to understand is how it’s defining things like geographies, and also peak usage periods more precisely, because what works in downtown Toronto might not work in some other, rural areas ‑‑ in Manitoba, for instance. And so, we think that having more concrete examples into elaborating these type of data will be very helpful, for instance, using sub‑region units like tiered service areas, or even tower level zones. So, people can use this data ‑‑ this will be more useful for them when they have to make informed decisions purchasing their phone service.

1652 I will pass it over to you.

1653 MR. FEWER: In any consumer education front, in any area where there is an education component, that has to back up kind of the primary initiative. So, if we’re thinking about this in terms of, like, data ‑‑ and I urge you to think of it in that way ‑‑ then you should also be thinking about it being provided to consumers in layers. So, the barest layer would just be the data itself, a CSB file that would be accessible to a tool or to an individual who wanted to look at the bare numbers.

1654 But then, the next layer might be, I think, the labels ‑‑ the nutrition labels that we’re talking about here. There are going to be some decisions made about what information appears first ‑‑ what’s biggest, how is it laid out. Those decisions are going to be informed by what you learn from consumers about what’s important to them.

1655 But there also has to be kind of a back‑up layer that maybe it’s on a ‑‑ imagine a web page on the CRTC site, or maybe it’s something that’s mandated to appear on each service provider’s site, that describes what each data type represents, and there you could have examples. Or imagine a tool, you know, that I have described to you ‑‑ a mobile app that accesses the data real time, and just with a touch, you can figure out, well, what does this mean? What does it mean in terms of actual usage? Very flexible, very responsive ways to give access to this information.

1656 So, short answer is yes, context is important. The longer answer is the beauty of this approach is that we can decide how to provide that context and what layers make sense to consumers at different points in their purchasing experience ‑‑ or experience as customers of these services.

1657 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: One of the things we have heard over the last couple of days is the importance of providing flexibility to ISPs because the market is competitive, they are trying to do dynamic pricing ‑‑ all kinds of reasons why they would want to have flexibility in the information they provide to consumers.

1658 How do we balance your recommendation with also providing the flexibility needed to be competitive in the marketplace?

1659 MR. FEWER: Well, this is why I really want you to think about this as data and not as a label. When you think of a label, that’s something sticky that gets stuck on a box, and it’s there forever. That’s not how we should be thinking about this.

1660 We should be thinking that this information can be provided to consumers as dynamically as the service offerings themselves. If it’s merely the matter of uploading your most recent price offering, and that might change tomorrow, that’s a click of a button; right? And that gets immediately uploaded and accessed ‑‑ accessible through an open data repository. So, we can be that flexible. We can be that dynamic.

1661 The internet is ‑‑ it should be trite to say this, but the internet is a much more dynamic entity than our internet service providers are. It can keep up with them. If we come up with a tool, if we come up with a mechanism for providing consumers with this information that’s as reflexive as and responsive as the internet can be, then this is not an issue.

1662 MS. MANHAU FUNG: Just to add a final note, you know, from a consumer perspective, from a community, this type of approach that we are asking, we don’t see it as conflicting with the ‑‑ you know, the type of interests, because as in, like, it’s not conflicting with the innovation, but this type of ask that we are putting out here can help regaining the trust ‑‑ consumer trust ‑‑ onto a service provider, because right now, they feel very resigned and powerless as in what they can get, and so, we think this is, like, a really important component as to why we have to step in here to kind of reinstall that kind of trust between service provider and consumers.

1663 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Just a question on cost, because we have heard several intervenors comment on the cost of implementing a system like that. Is that a factor, in your view, that we should be mindful of?

1664 MR. FEWER: I don’t have a realistic understanding of what the cost is. It seems to me this is information that consumers already have access to in various forms; they’re just getting it through marketing mechanisms as opposed to through a more trustworthy intermediary. There plainly will be some costs, I think, in standardizing measurements kind of across the board. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have, like, the exact, identical tools measuring the exact, identical load at the exact, identical time. But it needs to be trustworthy. It needs to be fair, both to service providers and consumers.

1665 So, the short answer is yes. I mean, cost is a consideration. I’m not going to tell you that it’s not. But, you know, by and large, we’re talking about standardizing in some way information that ISPs already say that they’re providing to consumers and that, by extension, we’re already saying that consumers rely upon in making their decisions for ISP services.

1666 So, how can we find a way to improve that reliance, to make that reliance worth consumers’ time? This is a good way to do that. I think this is a ‑‑ again, this is about promoting a competitive and efficient marketplace, at bottom. That’s what it comes down to. And so, I think this is worth the investment.

1667 MS. MANHAU FUNG: Just to further elaborate, just slightly a little bit more. It’s an investment to help install the trust that I mentioned earlier, but I think the IT cost claims to a certain extent exaggerated, because big telcos maintain real‑time telemetry for them to do live statistic on the latency speed and reliability for them to operate their own network. These are things that internally available. It’s about additional cost investing into it, into turning those data available into a consumer‑ready format, for people to read it. So, we were not asking, like, things like labelling to be, like, completely reinvented into something new, but just like we’re finding what things they have, make it accessible to people and make it more open.

1668 And let’s be honest ‑‑ I don’t think cost is, like, a real barrier right here. Bell, Rogers, Telus control over 83 percent of Canada’s wireless and internet revenue, pulling in nearly 50 billions in 2023 alone. So, just three companies hold almost 90 percent of wireless revenue and over 75 percent national spectrum licence in Canada, and there is ‑‑ like, these are some of the most profitable telecom companies in the world.

1669 You know, that kind of profit means that they can afford full disclosure ‑‑ something that consumers deserve, because we pay for the service that we pay every month, and so, arguing that a nutrition label is too costly, so, it’s kind of tone deaf to me when these firms continue to, you know, generate billions in revenue and maintain high margins when, you know, Canadians’ affordability is still ranked amongst the worst globally.

1670 And so, in that kind of, like, market concentration, I think, you know, we can do better into protecting consumers, because if you’re talking about market, there is no competitive pressure into making them to do better. And the type of ask we are asking here today ‑‑ you know, it’s not complex. It’s very simple and clear.

1671 MR. FEWER: Just three quick points, just to follow up on that. We see mandatory disclosure requirements across the board in various industries, and it’s never really pointed at as a significant regulatory burden. Second, we see the kind of labeling system that we’re talking about here in other jurisdictions, and again, it’s nothing that’s breaking anybody’s bank. And third, I’m reasonably certain that the cost of implementing is going to be a small fraction of the marketing budgets of the companies that we’re talking about, and so I’m going to sleep at night okay, when this goes through.

1672 COMMISSIONER DESMOND: Thank you very much for your responses.

1673 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Commissioner.

1674 Let's go to Commissioner Abramson next, please.

1675 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks, and thanks for being here with us.

1676 You’ve talked in your submissions about wanting data and metrics that are comparable. I guess ‑‑ and you’ve probably heard this in listening to some of the other folks appearing before us ‑‑ at some point there’s a tradeoff between how comparable the metrics will be, and how long it will take to get any of this, should we go in that direction, going.

1677 Where would you fall in that spectrum?

1678 MR. FEWER: Yeah. I mean, I am not an engineer, so I can't speak to the specifics. I presaged at least a little bit of how I think about this. I understand that different systems are going to be using different technology, and it’s not just a matter of doing like‑for‑like across the board, across all these different systems.

1679 It strikes me that what we need is something that’s good enough, right ‑‑ something that is fair and accurate, to meet the needs of consumers. And so, again, that strikes me as something that is doable. Companies are already advertising these figure. They’re measurable. So, it’s just a matter of finding a way to make them comparable that’s not excessively expensive and again, that’s fair both to consumers and to the companies.

1680 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks. Let me ask another trade‑off question You have asked, I think ‑‑ and correct me ‑‑ that we mandate two things. One is publication of this structured data in an open format, and the other is publication of this structured data in a nutritional label format. ISPs have said it’s enough to mandate a methodology, if they’ve even gone this far, and to say, but we should be free to publish it in the format that’s appropriate for our consumers.

1681 So, those are two different framings of this. If you could only pick one approach that was different from what those ISPs are asking for, which would it be? In other words, which is more important  ‑‑ the nutritional labels in a structured data format, or the open data publication to enable others to make nutritional labels?

1682 MR. FEWER: You are going to get a different answer from different advocates. I am a data geek and I’ve already told you that that’s what I think the value here is, which is getting the data out. Once the data is out and easily accessible, then there should be plenty of opportunities for service providers to make that information accessible to consumers.

1683 The flip side of it is that, you know, there is going to be a huge subset of consumers out there who aren’t going to be looking for these things. They’re going to be at point‑of‑sale. They’re going to be looking for information about the services, you know, at the ‑‑ well, there, at the point‑of sale, where they’re seeking to spend the money. And so, I do see real value in that consistent label approach.

1684 So, I really do ‑‑ you know, you asked me to choose one, so I would choose the data, because that gives you both at least to a certain extent, but it really is a belt and suspenders approach. I think you do need to do both, to actually service consumers in the way that you want to in this hearing.

1685 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks. You've mentioned obviously the U.S. is doing broadband nutritional labels, and following their lead a little bit in your recommendation. Is it important in what you are recommending that our nutritional labels be similar to the U.S. format? Is there some sort of value that you’re ascribing to consistency and folks across national markets perhaps becoming familiar with particular approaches and interoperability, and so on?

1686 And obviously, I’m asking, mindful of the fact that, as some of the intervenors who have appeared before us have pointed out, we’re starting from different places. In other words, we mandate significantly more price information in our approach under the Internet Code, which is really what a lot of the U.S. nutritional label is likewise focussed on.

1687 So, given that, what would be your view there?

1688 MR. FEWER: So, I will confess to not having thought deeply about this. I will say this. One of the real values I think of food nutrition labels is that international consistency. When you cross the border, shopping, it’s the same labels that are there. And so, consumers don’t need to reeducate themselves when they go on vacation in the United States ‑‑ in another three‑and‑a‑half years’ time.

1689 And so, there is some value, I think, in having a standardized way similar information is being provided. But the reality is, I don’t think we’re there yet on this kind of information. It is more market‑specific. We don’t have the situation where, you know, Canadian service providers are also providing those same services across the border ‑‑ at least not so much. Maybe some of the international satellite stuff is there. But that cross‑border benefit isn't quite the same.

1690 So, my instinct would be to say, ‘Oh, let’s experiment and figure out what’s right for the Canadian marketplace.’ We’re trying to serve Canadian consumers, so let’s meet their needs. And so, that’s I think where I would fall. I would fall on the side of, Let’s do it right, and then, if we have to break it to meet international norms or international standardizations, then we can talk about that then. But for right now, let’s meet the needs of Canadian consumers.

1691 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks. Let me now move to the question of enforcement and the CCTS. So, in your submissions, there were some thoughts and recommendations on the CCTS playing a role in this area, and I think there was a recognition of what that might mean in terms of transforming the CCTS’s mandate and role.

1692 How do you see that taking place?

1693 MR. FEWER: All right. My instinct on this one is to bail and to get back to you with a response.

1694 But I will say ‑‑ I mean, that’s what the CCTS is there to do, right ‑‑ to take care of kind of that first layer of ‑‑ I was about to say complaints, but it’s not that ‑‑ it’s the friction that inevitably happens when you’ve got an industry this big, providing this many services to this many Canadians. And so, the CCTS does strike me as the right place to address these kinds of concerns that may require looking at its mandate. But to be honest, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t think that the CCTS ever should have been a, you know, ‘build it once and forget about it’ kind of institution. We need to be looking at it and figuring out how we adjust its mandate, its resources, to address the needs of Canadians in this space. And so, it does strike me as the right place to do this, and it does strike me that, if we need to adjust things to make that happen, then we should be doing that ‑‑ we should be looking at that anyway.

1695 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Currently, more technical and more disclosure‑related items ‑‑ and I am thinking in particular about internet traffic management practices ‑‑ ITMP ‑‑ complaints are handled by the CRTC ‑‑

1696 MR. FEWER: Yes.

1697 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON:  ‑‑ as opposed to the CCTS. Why wouldn’t we follow that? I mean, isn't there a better analogy to ITMP disclosures than there is to sort of individualized contract disputes, here?

1698 MR. FEWER: Well, that is kind of the beauty, I think, of this approach, is that we are combining technical matters that are of interest to some consumers with pricing and market‑based information that may be more sensitive to the majority of consumers. So, if we needed to do a division, these kinds of complaints or these kinds of concerns go to the CCTS, more technical issues are dealt with by the CRTC at a place where the expertise lies. Let’s do that. I don’t have ‑‑ I’m not religious about all of the issues going one place or the other. Do what makes sense.

1699 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: And then, let me ask you about ‑‑ and I think finally, for me ‑‑ about enforcement more broadly. So, in your proposal that the CCTS get involved, I sort of understood that as a bit of a bottom‑up sort of enforcement mechanism, you know, in the form of ‑‑ at the end of the day, you talked about fines, and I assumed you were alluding to the CCTS as cost to those who become respondents on a complaint.

1700 When you talk about enforcement, is that what you had in mind? Or were you thinking of other mechanisms and particularly there, you know, it strikes me that perhaps you had in mind an analogy to the old consumer quality of service targets that we used to see on the PSTN, where there were periodic percentages that you had to hit, and if you hit below that percentage, there was a penalty associated with it. So are you thinking more of a bottom‑up or is it a top‑down, you know, consumer quality of service type system of enforcement or both? I mean, I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

1701 MR. FEWER: I’ll say, again, it doesn't necessarily need to be one size fits all, right, because the enforcement issue will vary with the nature of the ‑‑ let’s call it the transgression, right. If it’s a relatively ‑‑ mistakes get made, right, so if it’s a mistake about, I don’t know, some kind of planned bundling element that doesn’t quite get translated right into, that strikes me as something that the CCTS can handle and it’s probably the right place to deal with it there and the cost ‑‑ well, I guess apparently we call it a cost mechanism. You know, the compensation mechanism built into the CCTS can handle that kind of thing.

1702 But if it’s a more significant issue, you can ‑‑ you know, it’s a competitive marketplace and, you know, I think the best of all the providers in our place, but bad things can happen, misrepresentations can occur. And it strikes me that that might not be an issue for the CCTS. That might be an issue for the CRTC. That might be an issue for class actions. You know, there are multiple regulatory options available.

1703 Where I’d fall back to this is the CRTC has a very robust regulatory toolkit and so kind of an assessment of the nature of the different transgressions that might occur with respect to this regime can be thought through and appropriate tools taken out of the toolbox for different transgressions.

1704 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: And you know, we’re are talking about enforcement and all kinds of mechanisms that I dare say some might suggest that it goes a little further than they would have thought the scope of this hearing would extend to, which is really about making additional information available, not about finding oneself with a whole new whack of regulatory potential liabilities.

1705 What’s your view in making these recommendations that relate, really, to enforcement?

1706 MR. FEWER: Yeah. I don't see us asking for anything new here. Like there’s no new grounds of liability. It’s the traditional grounds of liability. You have to be honest and transparent in your pricing. You have to be honest and transparent in your technical representations to consumers. So all the same rules would apply to this ‑‑ to these kinds of communications.

1707 If it’s applicable in your marketing communications, it’s going to be applicable to your communications to consumers here.

1708 COMMISSIONER ABRAMSON: Thanks. Those are my questions, Mr. Vice‑Chair.

1709 THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Commissioner.

1710 Let's go to Commissioner Naidoo next, please.

1711 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: Thank you.

1712 Hi. Thanks for being here.

1713 Some ISPs, as you probably heard, have said that the label system just hasn’t worked in the U.S. That’s been a recurring theme. But do you think that there are ways to fix what hasn’t worked south of the border so that a better system can be offered in Canada?

1714 MR. FEWER: Yes. Look at what hasn’t worked there and improve on it. Make sure that the information that we’re providing is responsive to what Canadians have told us that we need. And I think that the data‑driven approach is the way to do it.

1715 Think of this as mandating data, making data available to consumers about service provision, you know, in a form that’s just more useful to consumers.

1716 I think using those kinds of approaches, getting away from the thought of thinking of this as a nutritional label, like that is ‑‑ that is wrong. It’s the data. It’s the information that’s being provided. That’s the value.

1717 Think of it that way and then I think we can also think about ways to improve the experience that Canadians will enjoy versus what may have happened in the United States.

1718 COMMISSIONER NAIDOO: All right. Thank you. That's all I have. Thanks.

1719 THE CHAIRPERSON: Great. I think those are our questions for you today.

1720 We’d like to thank you very much for participating both in writing and in person to get your views on the record, and we do like to close by giving you a moment either to get across a last point that didn’t come up in the questioning or to underline a particular point of emphasis. The floor’s yours for final thoughts.

1721 MS. MANHAU FUNG: First of all, thank you so much for the opportunity to speak today.

1722 So for years, we have been restlessly championing for a pro‑consumer reform in telecom policies and for honest, transparent reporting on the service performance. We didn’t just watch from the sidelines. We raised our voices loudly for, you know, different policy‑making processes, including Bill C‑299 in 2021 as well as Bill C‑288 in 2022.

1723 When these laws finally passed, our community celebrated because this represents great progress to holding the industry accountable. But make no mistake, the problem is far from solved and, also, the internet and all the problems are evolving every single day.

1724 So too many service providers these days sell, you know, their fastest possible speeds at absolute peak under perfect conditions, making consumers believe that they will get all the time, but the truth is, most Canadians see this far less than that, especially during busy hours. Sometimes it’s just a tiny fraction of what’s promised, and don’t forget many people are nowadays accessing from their mobile phone using mobile internet as their primary source of access to the internet. And that’s also a lifeline for them because, for those people, they are trying to integrate into more using this type of services and we should have more protections in place to protect them.

1725 Right now many, many Canadians are really fed up with the situations, especially members from our community. We want our internet that we pay for to be more reliable. We don’t want to be a struggle or stuck for months when we just want to switch for a service provider that may help them improve their situation or maybe they face the same disappointment.

1726 There’s no clear way for consumer and, in Canada, we don’t have that many choices, and so we really hope that with this kind of dialogue today can help us to bring in regulations that really help protect our, you know, everyday Canadians. And our position is very simple and unshakeable. Every consumer has the right to know before they sign up, during their ‑‑ the period when they are with a certain provider, and we should have a right to decide when we want to switch and not being trapped in certain service with their marketing tactics.

1727 We should be there to empower everyday Canadians by enforcing this type of ‑‑ you know, enforcing their rights to have quality and reliable connectivity and, you know, pro‑consumer reforms in telecom aren’t just nice ideas. They are essentially for fairness and accountabilities, and they will help Canadians make informed decision and that will force internet providers to compete based on the real performance that they can deliver, not empty marketing promises.

1728 And thank you so much for today, and that’s it. And thank you so much.

1729 THE SECRETARY: Thank you.

1730 We will resume tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. Have a great evening.

‑‑‑ L'audience est ajournée à 14 h 08 pour reprendre le jeudi 12 juin 2025 à 9 h 00

Sténographes
Deana Johansson
Monique Mahoney
Lynda Johansson
Tania Mahoney
Brian Denton