Thank you very much.
If we take a look at the CRTC's forbearance order, they said, as many regulators around the world have said, that they will deregulate once the incumbent phone companies lose significant market power, and they assessed a 25% market share loss as the point at which significant market power is lost. We agree that this is the right number. But if you look today at the numbers for the market share losses the phone companies have incurred in most of their major markets, they're already at the 25% level, or quite close.
Why is it that they have not simply applied for deregulation under the CRTC process? Why are they so opposed to the CRTC process and so in favour of this order? There are really two reasons, which my colleagues have alluded to.
The first is that the proposed order, unlike the CRTC decision, immediately eliminates the winback rules. Those rules are eliminated as soon as the order is promulgated, whereas the CRTC required the phone companies to lose 20% market share before the winback rules are eliminated.
The second is the quality-of-service standards. Those have been watered down by the proposed order.
I think those two changes are very significant.
Dealing with the winback rules first, those rules say that for the first three months after you get a customer, the incumbent cannot phone up that customer to make them a special offer.
There were the same rules in cable television. In fact, in cable television we still have those same rules today for apartment buildings and condominiums, to protect Bell ExpressVu, who argued for them long and hard. The reason for those rules is that in a network business they know exactly what customers they have and know exactly when they've gone to the competitor. It's a way to try to give the competitor a chance to get started before competition just gets knocked out of the box.
The quality-of-service standards are also important. They're important because what they say is that when you get interconnection facilities or services from the incumbent; or business solutions, for companies like Rogers, which gets unbundled loops for the business market; or high-speed pipes from the phone companies; or, for companies such as Rogers that offer telephone service where we don't have cable—we offer it in Montreal and Calgary and Vancouver and have no cable there and need to use phone-company loops—they have to give you the same quality of service on those wholesale facilities as they give for their retail customers. And they never do; they always fall short on that quality of service.
Once the CRTC made it a requirement that they had to meet those quality-of-service standards to get deregulation, we started to see some rapid improvement in the quality of service, a dramatic improvement that I believe will come to an end now that the proposed order, once it becomes a final order, will successfully water down those quality-of-service standards.
Thank you very much.