The CRTC has tossed out a complaint from Bell accusing Videotron of abusing its access to Bell’s wireless network, ending a dispute that’s been dragging on for years.
At the heart of the July 17 decision is wholesale roaming, the arrangement that lets smaller carriers put their customers onto a bigger carrier’s network when they wander outside their own coverage. The CRTC forced Bell, Rogers and Telus to offer it back in 2015, with one condition attached: roaming has to be occasional rather than permanent, so nobody can build a business running full time on somebody else’s towers.
Bell figured Videotron customers were doing exactly that, and in 2021 it told the CRTC that too many Videotron users were living on Bell’s network, asking the regulator to step in with orders and a financial penalty.
The problem here is the CRTC has never set a number for what counts as too much roaming, purposely leaving carriers to hash that out between themselves, which is what it told Bell and Videotron to do in a 2022 letter.
Bell didn’t like that answer and asked the CRTC to reverse itself, arguing the regulator had made legal errors and was ducking its own duty to enforce the rules.
The CRTC wasn’t buying it, since overturning a decision means showing there’s real doubt about whether it was correct in the first place, and the Commission found Bell didn’t clear that bar on any of its main arguments.
Bell also claimed Videotron had given itself a free pass by using its own homemade yardstick for measuring permanent roaming. Videotron checks its systems monthly and flags users who spend more than half their data or voice usage on someone else’s network two months running, which Bell argued unfairly benefited Videotron customers. The CRTC noted Bell never produced any evidence that other carriers use stricter tests, leaving nothing to compare it against.
Four years after Bell filed, the result is that its application is denied, Videotron faces no penalty, and the CRTC is repeating what it’s been saying all along: both companies need to sit down and work out their own threshold, with staff mediation available if they can’t manage it alone.
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