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...the CRTC, in theory at least, deregulated local services provided over phone lines in Canada to break up the cartel of the old ex-monopolist "incumbent local exchange carriers" (ILECs) like Bell Canada, SaskTel, Aliant Telecom and Telus. The "CLECs" (competitive local exchange carriers) that popped up to compete with the crotchety old ILECs in providing digital and voice services--Sprint Canada, AT&T Canada, GT Group Telecom, Axxent, Call-Net and the like--had the starry-eyed optimism of any other dot-com. But the crash of high-tech equity markets caught them at exactly the wrong moment, and now there are only handful of small CLECs left, fighting to survive. (In a slightly schizoid twist, Telus is actually, under the law, both an ILEC and a CLEC--it's an incumbent at home, in B.C. and Alberta, and a "new" local provider in the rest of Canada.)
Lately, the fight has been highly visible in the CRTC's regulatory arena. Over the past year, the CRTC has ruled against ILECs six separate times in regulatory disputes with CLECs. The new small companies started out with big dreams of building their own national networks, but with the dot-com collapse they are stuck buying access to phone lines wholesale (at government-fixed prices) from, you guessed it, the ILECs. The old phone companies would like nothing better than for their competitors to die off, and the repeated disputes have arisen when they have tried to interpret regulation as freely as possible and use their position to undercut CLECs.
ILECs understandably take the view that if phone service is supposed to be a competitive, deregulated environment, then very well!--let the cutthroat competition commence. And so the CRTC has found itself regulating industry bickering all the...
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