CRTC chair faces grilling on Internet billing decision

[chicot60]

CTV.ca News Staff <br />
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The head of the CRTC is being called before a Commons committee Thursday to explain an unpopular ruling that effectively kills unlimited Internet download packages. <br />
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The...

[chicot60]

Sorry about that! Canada <br />
Sorry about that! Canada reverses metered Internet decision <br />
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By Matthew Lasar Oops! <br />
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Terrified by a critical mass of enraged broadband consumers, Canada's government is...

[Night Prowler]

yeah.....squeeze the very last dollar out of everyone.....I want a monopoly......:lol:

[Gunsmoke2 - GS2]

Why should that be anyone else's problem. In their business plan did they plan to have their customers finance their project. This is a company that has money to burn so its hard to have any ...

[TLG]

bell canada is a HUNGRY GREEDY BEAR who does not want companies like NetFlix taking
from their PPV markets...

i applaud the canadian government for taking a stance on this .... should hold well for the
harper government given we are coming close to elections ... i hope the decision stays past
elections ...

you know how politics works, they promise something pre elections and then things change
post elections .... time will tell

[LoadandGo]

After the Conservative government tells the CRTC to reverse its decision or else . . . the CRTC is starting to back peddle.

hxxp://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2011/02/03/crtc-committee.html

[free1965tv]

greedy big corporation!

[chicot60]

Bell Canada has removed the tool its uses to monitor consumers' Internet data usage and started reversing charges to some customers amid one of the biggest consumer backlashes in the company's...

[JCO]

The petition is at about 450,000 signatures.. The CRTC has always been on the major providers side . The Oligopoly formed by Bell, Rodgers, Videotron has been lobying constantly for their interests.. The problem is that there are few if no consumer groups in front of the CRTC.. Most Monopolies have to pay for user groups representation in front of the board.. It is a common practice in Energy utilities..It should also be the case for the CRTC..

[satchick]

Wasn't most of our fibre backbone subsidized by the Federal government? I would imagine that it's pretty much paid for itself by now anyways... <br />
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Now, what effect would capping data transfer have on...

[Blaster]

I was just looking into history of Bell Canada. And after all the wheeling, dealing, privatizations, and everything else I still come to the conclusion that the tax payer's dollars paid for the infrastructure of Bell. Yet some how they managed to split up into various different for-profit sub-corporations that are dictating what we, the same ol' taxpayers, pay for our phone and internet. Isn't this ironic...

c/p from wikipedia

Bell Canada, commonly shortened to "Bell", is a major Canadian telecommunications company. Including its subsidiaries such as Bell Aliant, Northwestel, Télébec, and NorthernTel, it is the incumbent local exchange carrier for telephone and DSL Internet services in most of Canada east of Manitoba and in the northern territories, and a leading competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) in the western provinces. Its subsidiary Bell Mobility is one of Canada's "big three" mobile telecommunications providers, while Bell TV is the country's most popular direct-to-home satellite TV provider. In a majority of its service territory, Bell Canada's principal competition is Rogers Communications. The company, is headquartered in Montreal, Quebec.

Bell Canada is the main asset of BCE Inc. (TSX: BCE, NYSE: BCE), also known as Bell Canada Enterprises, a former conglomerate operating in a variety of businesses. BCE ranks number 224 on the Forbes Global 2000 list (2008 edition). In 2007, BCE accepted a purchase offer from a group led by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, but in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, the resulting corporate structure (including the debt load that would have been assumed) was deemed to not meet necessary solvency criteria, and the takeover was cancelled. Bell announced in September 2010 a deal to reacquire full control of the broadcasting properties of CTVglobemedia, expanding once again into creating content in support of its various distribution platforms.

History

Historically, Bell Canada has been one of Canada's most important and most powerful companies, and in 1975 was listed as the fifth largest in the country

Inception

Alexander Graham Bell, who resided increasingly for most of his life in Nova Scotia, Canada, received 'the master patent' (U.S. Patent 174,465) for the telephone in the United States in 1876. Bell assigned 75% of the Canadian patent rights to his father, Melville Bell, who, with a friend, Reverend Thomas Henderson, leased pairs of wooden hand telephones for use on private lines constructed by the client from, for example, a store to a nearby warehouse, or from a business to an executive's residence. The two gave a licence to Hugh Cossart Baker, Jr. to lease telephones in Ontario. In 1879 Melville Bell sold the rights to National Bell Telephone Company in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, and thus officially became one of the first regional operating companies of what was to become the Bell System. Charles Fleetford Sise, a Chicago businessman, was brought in as general manager, and The Bell Telephone Company of Canada Ltd. was founded in 1880. With a government-granted monopoly on Canadian long-distance telephone service[citation needed], The Bell Telephone Company serviced 237,000 subscribers by 1914.

Since the early years of The Bell Telephone Company of Canada, Ltd., it was known colloquially as "The Bell" or "Bell Canada." On March 7, 1968, Canadian law renamed The Bell Telephone Company of Canada, Ltd., as Bell Canada.

Competition and territory reduction

Bell Canada originally extended lines clear from Nova Scotia to the foot of the Rocky Mountains in what is now Alberta. However, most of the attention given to meeting demand for service focused on major cities in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime Provinces.

During the late 19th century, Bell sold its Atlantic operations in the three Maritime provinces, but acquired interests in all Atlantic companies during the early 1960s: in Newfoundland Telephones (which later was organized as NewTel Communications), in Maritime Telephone and Telegraph Company, later known as MT&T, which also owned PEI-based Island Telephone, and in Bruncorp, the parent company of NBTel. These four companies later merged into Aliant (now Bell Aliant which also owns much of what were Bell Canada's more rural areas in Ontario and Quebec) in the late 1990s, in which Bell continues to own a stake.

Independent companies appeared in many areas of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces without adequate Bell Canada service. Bell went on during the 20th century to acquire most of the independent companies in Ontario and Quebec. Quebec, however, still has large swaths of relatively rural areas served by Québec Telephone (later acquired by Telus) and Télébec (now owned by Bell Canada via Bell Aliant) as well as some 20 small independent companies. As of 1980, Ontario still had some 30 independent companies, and Bell has not acquired any; the smaller ones were sold to larger independents with larger capital resources.

The three prairie provinces, at separate times up to 1912, acquired Bell Canada operations and formed provincial utility services, investing to develop proper telephone services throughout those provinces; Bell Canada's investment in the prairies had been scant or insufficient relative to growth. Having achieved a high level of development, Manitoba moved to privatize its telephone utility and Alberta privatized Alberta Government Telephones to create Telus in the 1990s. Saskatchewan continues to own SaskTel as a crown corporation. Edmonton was served by a city-owned utility that was sold to Telus of Alberta in 1995.

British Columbia, served today by Telus, was served by numerous small companies that mostly amalgamated to form BC Tel (the last known acquisition was the Okanagan Telephone Company in the late 1970s), which served the province from the 1960s until its sale to Telus. (The amalgamations produced one anomaly: Atlin is surrounded by the territory of Northwestel, implying that the company that established service there was acquired by a company serving territories further south.)

Although Bell Canada entered the Northwest Territories with an exchange at Iqaluit (then known as Frobisher Bay, in the territory now known as Nunavut) in 1958, Canadian National Telecommunications, a subsidiary of Canadian National Railways, provided most of the telephone service in Canada's northern territories. CNR created Northwestel in 1979, and Bell Canada Enterprises acquired the company in 1988 as a wholly owned subsidiary. Bell Canada sold its 22 exchanges in the eastern region of the NWT to Northwestel in 1992, and BCE transferred ownership of the company to Bell Canada in 1999.

Divestiture and deregulation

The Bell System had two main companies in the telephone industry in Canada: Bell Canada as a regional operating company (affiliated with AT&T, with an ownership stake of approximately 39%) and Northern Electric as an equipment manufacturer (affiliated with Western Electric, with an ownership stake of approximately 44%). The Bell Telephone Company of Canada and Northern Electric were structured similarly in Canada to the analogous portions of the Bell System in the United States; the regional operating company (Bell Canada) sold telephone services as a local exchange carrier, and Western Electric (Northern Electric) designed and manufactured telephone equipment.

As part of the consent decree signed in 1956 to resolve the antitrust lawsuit filed in 1949 by the United States Department of Justice, AT&T and the Bell System proper divested itself of Northern Electric and Bell Canada. Northern Electric renamed itself Northern Telecom in 1976, which in turn became Nortel Networks in 1998 with the acquisition of Bay Networks.

Bell Canada acquired 100 percent of Northern Electric in 1964; starting in 1973, Bell's ownership stake in Northern Electric was diminished through public stock offerings, though it retained majority control. In 1983, as a result of deregulation, Bell Canada Enterprises (later shortened to BCE) was formed as the parent company to Bell Canada and Northern Telecom. As a result of the stock transaction used by Northern Telecom to purchase Bay Networks, BCE ceased to be the majority owner of Nortel, and in 2000, BCE spun out its share of Nortel, distributing its holdings to its shareholders.

Between 1980 and 1997, the federal government fully deregulated the telecommunications industry and Bell Canada's monopoly largely ended. Today Bell Canada itself provides local phone service only in major city centres in Ontario and Quebec

Convergence strategy / Internet boom and bust

When Jean Monty assumed the job of CEO in 1998, he pursued a convergence strategy, attempting to combine both content creation and distribution within BCE, and to take greater advantage of the emerging Internet market. BCE Emergis was formed to market e-commerce solutions. Capitalizing on the success of its Internet service provider division, Sympatico, in 1999 BCE formed a partnership with Lycos to create an Internet portal for its customers.

Shortly after the AOL – Time Warner merger, BCE purchased the CTV television network in 2000. In 2001, BCE acquired control of The Globe and Mail, and combined it with CTV and the Sympatico-Lycos portal, its other content creation assets, to form Bell Globemedia. The desired synergies did not occur and the portal was sold back to Bell Canada in 2002. Bell Globemedia was highly profitable, however, and it was spun out as a separate company in August 2006. The new company assumed the name CTVglobemedia in 2007.

In 2000, BCE acquired control of Teleglobe, an overseas carrier coveted by Bell since the early 1980s. The acquisition was a disaster as BCE lost billions of dollars financing Teleglobe. In 2002, BCE sold Teleglobe, and Jean Monty resigned. Michael Sabia subsequently assumed the position of CEO