Industry Committee on Feb. 8th, 2018

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Five degrees?

[Pierre Collins]

Yes.

The fact that we work with municipalities helps us a lot, because they give us the rights of way. We can just start digging in the streets, you know—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Let's just stick with what the federal government could do.

[Pierre Collins]

The battle is endless. These costs are—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

If we regain control via the CRTC, and we go over the rental fees—

[Pierre Collins]

There are also maintenance fees, which are very high.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

There are maintenance fees?

[Pierre Collins]

Yes, that's what we call them.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

For the moment, you have to pay these fees. Right?

[Pierre Collins]

Absolutely.

The engineers will redo a design, realign the poles, decide to change the lines, and send us the bill, which we have to pay in full. The bill is one thing, but the time it all takes is another.

We are told that it will be done, but that our area isn't a priority.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

What solution would you suggest?

[Pierre Collins]

First, I think that we should have realistic costs when we do maintenance work; the costs should therefore be standardized. We should say that a pole costs $1,500, and not $4,500 as is sometimes the case.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

So they will bill—

[Pierre Collins]

That's engineering. Each project is evaluated and is given an identification number. I don't know if you remember a process called “special assembly”, which was a black box at the time in telecommunications. Things went in on one side, and came out on the other, and it cost $100,000.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

SaskTel, do you have any issues with pole access or people accessing your pole?

[John Meldrum]

We don't own very many poles. The vast majority of our backbone is buried. We don't have any issues there.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Let me then go then to another point that you raised about spectrum. You said that you have an issue with fixed wireless spectrum, not with cellular spectrum. What is your issue there? I thought a lot of fixed wireless spectrum was open or unused spectrum. What is the particular the issue you have with that?

[John Meldrum]

We have not deployed unlicensed spectrum for our fixed—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

You're not using unlicensed spectrum.

[John Meldrum]

We're not using unlicensed spectrum. We are using licensed spectrum.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Why don't you use the unlicensed spectrum for your fixed wireless?

[John Meldrum]

I did speak to our spectrum engineer the other day. It's a question of interference and quality of service. There are no guarantees. When people come to SaskTel for service, they're looking for something that's very robust.

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

If you use the unlicensed spectrum, you just don't have the quality you need. I got that.

Who has that spectrum? Why can't you get your hands on it?

[John Meldrum]

Industry Canada is going to auction it off. They say there is a cap of 60 MHz. Our issue is that the spectrum in the 2,500 band is not all created equally. You have the single band in the middle that we're not using for cellular. It doesn't have the up and the down. That's the one we use, and they count that as part of the cap. We tried to make submissions—

[Frank Baylis, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

You have a cap on your spectrum. Is that what you're telling me?