Industry Committee on Feb. 10th, 2011

[Ken Stein]

All I measure is what capacity they use over a month.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

But again, what if one of the independent service providers who is competing with you wants to build a model that is designed around something like that? Why shouldn't they have the ability to do that?

[Ken Stein]

If they want to do that with their customers through their investment, and they offer special services, if they want to do that, then that's fine. But that doesn't affect the rate that we charge them, because we're not going to do that.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I'd like to hear from Mr. Bibic on this.

[Mirko Bibic]

I agree with Mr. Stein. I would just add that again I go back to what OpenMedia themselves said. They view—

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

No, we've heard that already. No offence—

[Mirko Bibic]

No. This is another part, Mr. Lake.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

In fairness, I think you're kind of just ragging the puck here a little bit.

[Mirko Bibic]

No, because—

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I'd like to hear your answer to my question.

[Mirko Bibic]

Okay. Peak hour. I actually wanted to answer your question on peak hour pricing.

I agree with OpenMedia, who says peak hour pricing imposes higher fees on low-bandwidth customers. That's what would happen.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

A separate question, then, again.

Why can't ISPs, the small ISPs, be built on an aggregate basis for their use, for their customers' use?

[Mirko Bibic]

That solution has been proposed. Now there is a separate CRTC process. There are lots of ideas that are going to come forward on that separate CRTC process. That will obviously be one of the ideas, and I'm sure that others will have other suggestions.

So we're going to put our thinking caps on as well, and see if there isn't a different way to address this. But we believe fundamentally that what is ultimately ruled on by the CRTC has got to accept the principle that those who use the most pay the most, because if we don't, what's going to happen is everyone's going to have to pay more.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

What if those who use the most use it when the system is not being used at capacity? That has absolutely no cost to you.

What if one of your competitors wants to design a system around that?

[Mirko Bibic]

The issue here is that we build the capacity required in our network to address peak periods. So if the peak period that we anticipate requires a pipe this big, we have to build a pipe that big. That costs a lot of money.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

So you're—

[Mirko Bibic]

It costs a lot of money, Mr. Lake. That capacity is now there. If the heavy users avoid peak periods, what's going to happen is, who do you think is going to be funding that traffic, that capacity that we need at peak periods? It's going to be you and me, not the heavy users.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

Obviously if your competitors have packages that use the time at non-peak periods, that pipe doesn't have to grow any bigger to accommodate that capacity. Why can't they do that? You'd think that would be beneficial.

[Ken Stein]

It doesn't work that way. Right now what we're interested in doing is designing the system for the benefit of the maximum number of customers. The maximum number of customers make use of the Internet in prime-time periods. That's when people come home from work. Most people have day jobs, and they come home and that's when we want to offer the service.

If we then started differentiating and saying it's a different rate at one o'clock, a reaction from our 1.8 million Internet customers would be extreme.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

Maybe they'd see it as innovation—

[Ken Stein]

They'd see it as, oh, okay, so if I'm not working and if I'm unemployed and if I don't have a job, I can come home and download movies at one o'clock in the afternoon. No, I don't think so.

What we're trying to do is provide services to customers and families that make it convenient to use it at their time. That's why we invest $1 billion a year, to make sure we can serve those customers.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

But maybe what we need is some innovation that takes us off those old models.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you, Mr. Stein, Mr. Lake.

I don't think I've ever asked any questions at this committee, but if the committee will indulge me, there are just a couple of clarifications that I need to make because of what I heard today.

Mr. Stein, you said that your system does not have the capability to meter specific minute to minute, but Mr. Bibic, you had mentioned that your system does. Is that the case, that you can pinpoint minute by minute, hour by hour where your congestion is?

[Ken Stein]

Maybe I wasn't clear on this. We measure congestion second by second. You can come to Calgary and you can see our tech centre. We'd love you all to come and do that.

We monitor the congestion of all the networks, all the communities that we serve. Exactly as Mr. Bibic said, if we see a hotspot in a particular area in Fort McMurray, we try to fix that instantly. But that's not metering an individual.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you.

As a public company, do you make the number of your customers available to the general public?